The title of the song comes from one of the three verses that get repeated as a chorus moment throughout the song:

it’s not dying
it’s flowering
the snake bark bamboo

Although it is actually written about one of the bamboos in my garden, which is flowering and so will then die, but is not dead yet, it felt to me that I’m talking about other things, bigger things, whole systems of society that we are caught up in. A moment that is so close to death and yet so beautiful and is the crescendo of a life. It’s a beautiful bamboo.

It also then moved me to ask Lady Skollie if I could use one of her amazing drawings of Cagn, the trickster god of the San people in South Africa.I had seen this image and loved it when we were planning her show here in Birmingham back in 2019. It was drawn on a roughly circular piece of paper, and then someone had told her it was a cursed shape and so she decided to cut it down into a square for a show in Johannesburg. Skollie describes the work as ‘Cagn appearing as a spiral in the sky, coming down to speak. I made this work using a pussy print lino cut, printing it in the shape of a snake. In my world god is a writhing snake made from a million vaginas.’ It’s an irresistible image! She suggested I cut out the snake the way we did for her show poster here at Eastside Projects, so I cut out a new photoshopped version with a black background so the snake is free to float and whisper at you from any sky. Huge thanks to Laura (Lady Skollie) for releasing such an incredible form into my world too. To complete the circle back in 2019 I dug up some of the snake bark bamboo from my garden and planted it in one of my planters here in the gallery so it connected to Lady Skollie’s artworks. Some things are just connected, flower and die.

One of the other two ‘chorus’ verses is worth mentioning too:

climb trees race cars
fall asleep make noise
break protection orders

This refers to one of those symptoms of our current UK political system that feels like we’re dying – where councils and other powerful institutions that are designed to protect and provide security to people’s behaviour overstep the mark and turn a protective legal tool into an oppressive weapon to control people’s lives. The misuse of protection orders needs challenging.

And the rap poetics mentioned in the unspoken cut verse refers to the flight out to Holland that Paul and I were on when I was still working out how to make these verses work, and we were both travelling to complete our artwork for Into Nature Biennale out in the woods in Drenthe. There are a range of verses that are written just after completing the 555 verses and 77 verses published in our book Is this the way the universe works? On the occasion of the Biennale and just after sending the book off to print:

four ink time horizons
twenty five signatures
of sixteen

The book is 400 pages long and made of 25 sections of 16 pages that are printed in four specially chosen ink colours based on the flowers of plants in my garden at the time of making the book.

The five month walk is that of Matsuo Basho, the most famous Japanese writer, on his last major walk to write poetry way back in 1689. And of course this is the same Basho referred to in the song ‘Be Basho’ featured on my second album, Songs of the Modern World (Volume 2) (2021). Hopefully this new song will be on Volume 3.

Lastly I want to thank Red, my eldest wonderful child, who through cause and effect was a catalyst for ‘It’s not dying, it’s flowering’. A working title for this track was ‘Cycopath’ as Red wanted me to ask Paul if he would make some music for a short film that Red was working on. I asked and Paul came up with this brilliant driving piano, beat, and ‘cyco’ sounds which were to refer to both cycling and psychopath behaviours to be rapped over by the actor in the film. Red’s film evolved and other music took the place of Paul’s composition and the film became ‘Cyclepath’, which is being screened at festivals across the UK now. Paul forgot about the music, but I didn’t cus I could hear myself rapping over it. I could hear echoes of Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour de France’ and I found that the structure of my haiku verses fitted. I tried some out and I became addicted. I tried out some of the verses to Paul as we walked around the airport. I couldn’t get the tune or the verses out of my head. That’s when you know it’s working.