Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 36-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Rigid Man In An Ice Age
From a sun-bleached chair
with missing rungs
on a porch of weathered boards
a book is dropped on its broken spine
rigid man walks inside
The pages arch up turning
paper’s torn and grey
and he still doesn’t know what it means
and he still doesn’t know what it means
He lives in strange desolation
stopped by a thought caught in time
he’s decided the book has the answer
its extraction is long overdue
He’ll return to the porch
and sit down in his chair
and start again with obsession
fingers smooth-tipped from ritual turning
fingers smooth-tipped from ritual turning
every day he thinks about stopping
humiliated by a failure to learn
the method outlasting the tool
“Rigid Man In An Ice Age” from The Eagle And The Poodle (Matador, 1996) (download):
