A musician I don’t know
And a place I’ve never been
A song I don’t understand
Although I must say it’s grown on me

There’s quite a lot of chatter
About the meaning of the song
What’s a free ride?
That’s the question people ask

Freud would say
And therefore so would we
(Whose culture he has bamboozled
Even in Northumberland)
It’s a free fuck he’s after
Nick that is – not Siggy

A rare thing apparently
For this asexual curiosity
If so he’s copping out
By writing a song instead
Of doing the deed

It’s as if Nick was never quite here
Made a bit of an impression
With those in the know
And then died
Incomplete

I like to keep the sex out of it
That’s what he’d have preferred
And think that he was pleading
For something to be easy
Just once in his life

This piece would have been easier
If he’d had a Corbridge connection
Or indeed one that wasn’t
Burma Hampstead Cambridge
or Warwick

The Romans came
And the Christians
Leaving stuff behind
But mostly they left a twilit sense
Of something lived and believed
And frozen

My “Corbridge” rhyme was “drawbridge”
That’s desperate I thought
But then I read how he
“Seemed to view his life as though
From an unbridgeable distance”

Now that seems desperate
And oddly familiar to me
When I remember my days in Northumberland
With my dope and music

Nick with his dope and music
Behind the raised drawbridge
Watching the ducks in the moat
And of course, the drakes
Envying them their free ride

Tony Balazs