John on the original cover of Piece of Mind

"The song lyrics included on Piece of Mind that I wrote alone were written before the music was.
They began life as poems about people, issues, places, and emotions germane to my life in 1967 and 1968.
It is still a small source of minor irritation to me that those poems, carefully constructed around considerations of objective correlatives and owing more to Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, Francois Villon and Brecht than to any intoxicant or hallucinogen, should have been misrepresented over the years as examples of psychedelia." John Mackie 2005.

These small notes are John's attempt to redeem meaning after years of misinterpretation by commentators and musicians who should have known better.

Started life as a poem to and about my then partner's son Ty Teiger, who I lived with in a basement flat at 25 Powis Square in Notting Hill, the house used for the exteriors of the Roeg/Jagger film "Performance". In the poem I celebrate the strength and inventiveness of an imaginative child who transforms the poorest of found raw materials into spaces in which to play out the heroic fantasies of childhood.
This lyric has retrospectively achieved a prophetic sheen as the subject, Ty Teiger, grew up to be George Lucas' Property Master and is credited with inventing the Light Sabre for the Star Wars films.

Is a poem to and about a chronically depressed young woman called Jenny who was encouraged to come and talk to me by a mutual friend (Sarah Ellis) in the hope that I could do something to cheer her up or, better still, encourage her to accept unhappiness. I met her once, for two hours. The conversation was fitful at best, interrupted as it was by long silences as Jenny, immobilized and unreachable, went away somewhere in her unhappy head. She was a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, with cascading auburn hair, suddenly, often, and without preamble, as inanimate as stone.
I was reminded of Brecht: "That man across the street is already out of the reach of his friends", and began to imagine a State called Catatonia. If our friend had hoped that I would be some sort of border guard and turn Jenny back somehow, then that hope was not realized. I learned, about six months after our brief encounter, that she had committed suicide.

Is a poem about alienation, existentialist role playing and wanderlust and owes not a little to Camus' L'Étranger in the sense that the protagonist claims superiority of feeling. Roger Bunn changed the ordering of verses and omitted one, hence obscuring the meaning, in my view. It should begin with the verse starting "Words fall, looping to the floor" as this is the verse that establishes the emotional milieu in which all else takes place; this verse also begins the process of suggesting a new set of motivations for Jason and the Argonuats. I ask the listener to entertain the possibility of ontological uncertainty and social alienation as drivers of adventure and exploration, along with the lure of the Golden Fleece.

Borrows the bhuddist motif and applies it to living in London in 1968. Not much Antonioni or Fellini in this account of that time and place.

Is a piece of doggerel, based on Aztec human sacrifice, in which the victim addresses the statue on which her heart will be placed.

Is a poem in which I attempted to take on Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, by suggesting that courage, choice, risk-taking and curiosity rather than "survival of the fittest" are more interesting as mainsprings of social evolution.