BLIND CURVE

i) VOCAL UNDER A BLOODLIGHT (1)
Last night you said I was cold, untouchable
A lonely piece of action from another town
I just want to be free, I’m happy to be lonely
Can’t you stay away?
Just leave me alone with my thoughts,
Just a runaway, just a runaway
I'm saving myself

ii) PASSING STRANGERS
Strung out below a necklace of carnival lights,
Cold moon, held on the crest of the night.
I’m too tired to fight.

So now we’re passing strangers, at single tables,
Still trying to get over,
Still trying to write love songs for passing strangers,
All those passing strangers.

And the twinkling lies, all those twinkling lies,
Sparkle with the wet ink on the paper.

iii) MYLO
Oh I remember Toronto when Mylo went down (2)
And we sat and cried on the phone
I never felt so alone
He was the first of our own
Some of us go down in a blaze of obscurity (3)
Some of us go down in a haze of publicity
The price of infamy, the edge of insanity.

Another Holiday Inn, another temporary home
And an interviewer threatened me with a microphone,
”Talk to me, won't you tell me your stories.”

​

So I talked about conscience and I talked about pain
And he looked out the window and it started to rain,
I thought maybe I’ve already gone crazy
So I reached for a bottle and he reached for the door
And I picked up the sleeping pills crushed on the floor,
Inviting me to casual obscenity.

iv) PERIMETER WALK
It would be incredible if we could
Retrace all the times that we lived here,
All the collisions,
Wasted, I’ve never been so wasted,
I’ve never been this far out before.

Perimeter walk
There’s a presence here
I feel could have been ancient,
could have been mystical.

There’s a presence,
A child, my child,
My childhood, a misplaced childhood,
Give it back to me, give it back to me.
A childhood, the childhood,
Oh please give it back to me.

​

v) THRESHOLD
I saw a war widow in a launderette
Washing the memories from her husband's clothes.
She had medals pinned to a threadbare greatcoat
A lump in her throat with cemetery eyes.

I see convoys curb crawling West German Autobahns (4)
Trying to pick up a war.
They’re going to even the score
Oh... I can’t take any more.

I see black flags on factories,
Soup ladles poised on the lips of the poor,
I see children with vacant stares,
Destined for rape in the alleyways.

Does anybody care, I can’t take any more!
Should we say goodbye?

I see priests, politicians?
Heroes in black plastic body-bags

Under nations’ flags
I see children pleading with outstretched hands
Drenched in napalm, this is no Vietnam.

I can’t take any more, should we say goodbye,
How can we justify?
And they call us civilised!