KNOT

lyrics by Henk Hofstede



Ultramarine 


So many colours in my head

Ultramarine extra fine and white lead

The London fog is falling down

On the bridges of Westminster and Waterloo 

The London rain is falling down inside my head


The bell boy and the chambermaid

Found sheets of paper in the Savoy rooms


20 DOLLAR BILLS BASEMENT WIND BLOWS WRITE BRAILLE


With my left eye, everything is red

With my right eye, everything is blue


In my paradise with my fading eyes

I paint the water lilies while the soldiers die

What a waste 


Let’s roll out the red carpet for the skeleton army 

I don’t see red anymore, I see blue 

I remember very well how it was

So many colours in my head

Ultramarine extra fine, white lead


What a waste



The Delta Works


Aunt Eleonore is walking through the shadows

Aunt Eleonore is talking to the flowers and the birds and the trees 

Aunt Eleonore is walking through the house 

She said: ‘Don’t look back behind your shoulder to the cracks in our fading love 

With our dissappearing homemade serenades’


Aunt Eleonore, she is an astronaut from Tirol 

A lady of the canyon with a Russian TV 

All the family paintings were drowning in ‘53 in the dark black sea


And when the road is getting thinner and life is getting smaller 

Love is hurting like diamonds 

I was the green meadow and he was the dark black sea 

Now there’s a ghost standing behind every tree

I am here with you, I stay, I stay


When we get older as the years go by 

Like varnish on a painting that’s cracking like the soil of a desert 

Tears will fall on a piece of paper, paint me a river where I can swim 

Draw me a city, where I can walk in the streets of my youth


Will the Delta Works protect us from the waves and the water 

But they cannot protect us from personal disaster and matters of love 

And boredom and melancholy or depression 

A piece of paper


When we’re walking, we get older 

When we stop, we die



The Concrete House


I inherited the house when my mother died

I am an only child, no brothers, no sisters, no animals

My father has built this house for the family in 1968

A concrete house with one floor and a little garden in the shade

Now it hurts when I open the door


On the diving board of the swimming pool in the autumn rain

JUMP! 

I cannot jump

My mother is watching

Will she save me when I drown

And I fall 


I can swim, in my life 

All these years

‘Why are you leaving?’

‘That’s wanderlust’


There’s a woman in England who fills an empty house with concrete

And takes off the walls and the roof like you peel an orange

What’s left is the memory of the house in the shape of a block of concrete


For the first time, for the last time

I open the door



The Garden Center


Dear mother, take my eyes in your hand 

And walk me to your promised land in the garden center

Because you always went there

The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are gone to the Christmas sale

80 % off Mother Mary


With a rain cap

Your head is suddenly pink

We walk in the streets of my youth 

Boy in a tree 


Mother said : ‘I’m falling to pieces like my porcelain teacups 

On the white tiles of the kitchen floor’


You said :’I am almost crying like a river but flowers need some rain

I will never leave without a rain cap’


We sit down next to the coffee machine between the dwarfs of porcelain 

And a waterfall on the rococo chairs, the plastic rococo chairs


With a handkerchief and peppermint waiting for the day to end

Violas in your shopping bag

In Liverpool in the rain I hear a mother say to her son :

‘Let’s look at the Lego again’ 


Life never ends, like a flower it bends

Life never ends

My viola



The Blue Car


Highway

White lines

White clouds behind the trees

I drive in my blue car 


A bright day comes to an end

Sunlight in my eyes

In my blue car


A raindrop is falling on my window 

A raindrop

A little screen 

How can I see you there

With your pretty face and your pretty eyes

How can I see you


Raindrops like mercury

a blue car in the rain on a highway


It started with rain on the roof

I was a highway

It started with mercury drops

How can I see you there

With your pretty face and your pretty eyes

how can I see you




Machine Machine


Machine Machine you’re talking in my sleep

The yellow bees are flying through the library

Around the books and magazines on the honey shelves

Machine Machine you’re talking in my sleep


There’s a rusty flower falling from an iron tree

Bees on the ventilators turning round 

A beautiful girl is dropping a shopping list with oranges, 

Cereals and nuts on the library floor


I talk to the girl with the pearl earring

And I tell her she looks like a famous Dutch painting

Look at her Rank Xerox 

Look at her blue Apple Sprechblase


Look at the numbered shelves for Winter Trees 

Look at the honey shelves for Winter Trees 

She is dreaming in another language Weisheitszahn


She takes off her glasses and she is looking like a movie star

The library girl is walking around like Monica Vitti in the Deserto Rosso 

Look at the books, look at the magazines, look at the iron tree talking in my sleep


Machine Machine I’m talking in my sleep

There’s a yellow flower falling from the orange tree

Machine Machine I’m talking in my sleep


Look at the Rank Xerox Print my dream

She is dreaming in another language Weisheitszahn



Dead Rat Ball


Keeping the dead alive

He’s cutting the day with a knife (a blue envelope)

Painting the secret wars

He told me I about the danger of a dead balloon

Drinking with a stranger in the red saloon of the Kursaal


In this sea sick town

Dead end streets drown in the water and the waves

Perfume bottles croquettes de crevettes 

The boutiques with the plastic flowers

Snow globes of Marvin Gay

Ensor waves goodbye in the waves 

Playing the harmonium 8 hours a day 


Skeletons rattle like a castanets in battles we forget 

Dancing at the Dead Rat Ball 

Quick quick slow in the claire de lune 

Solitude, mystery and silence


Snow is falling in a snow globe

Perfume bottle in a window

Sometimes you sleep

Sometimes you keep me waiting

Now I see you waving goodbye


Keeping the dead alive




The Electric Pond


Already knows 

She already knows what day it is

But sometimes the envelope waits inside a letterbox for years

On the frozen pond outside the concrete cabin, the snow is falling 

The tracks of skaters disappear

Am I sleeping 


I am walking on the ice

Echo Lake, the Milky Way

All my five senses

Following the frozen wires in the electric pond

All my senses


A girl is skating on a pond

The black ice is a screen 

Birds in the trees

My reflection disapears on the ice 




Une petite Allumette 

Où va le temps? 

Une petite allumette dans le béton 




Music Box with Ballerina 


She is so beautiful and mean

My God, I wish that she was dead

I am so afraid of you

I hate you 

I saw you 


In the office downtown

The assistants are wearing brown and black H & M dresses

She is wearing a Dries van Noten overcoat 

And a Stella McCartney yellow submarine bag 


Am I walking too slow

Am I talking too fast

When I’m walking with you 

We walk inside another dimension


Smiling Mona Lisa

You’re so beautiful and mean

Like a flower in a forest that is eating flying insects


With her silver hairpin and other sharp objects

Sometimes I feel like a marble stone in a graveyard

In a coffin I am buried alive, knocking


Pretty ballerina

A pirouette machine 




(Un) Happy Hologram

Hello! I’m a spirit , almost a ghost

Hello! I’m a spirit, hello and goodbye

I do I do I do I do I do look like my father 

A happy man


So I heard the stories in my head oh

That he was happy, that he was unhappy

Every day, all the time


I had no moving picture of my father

I saw us, happy in a car 

Where are you now? 


Inside my computer there’s a thing 

There’s a thing called Happy Hologram 

Where he is walking, where he is talking 

So happy in my computer 

Where he was born a happy boy


Happy Birthday

Happy Hologram

My hologram dad

Happy and sad