Burning the Bridges in Budapest

They're burning the Bridges of Budapest
Watch as they all fall down
They're burning them slowly
Like a fire vest, you wear
Then jump in the river and drown

They're burning them slowly, they're burning them fast
all of those bridges not only, bridges to the past
Bridges to the future
Hopes and dreams
They're all falling into
The Danube streams

They're forgetting the town
Forgetting people too
They're burning the bridges down
That means you
Its time to get out before its all lost
Once the bridges are all burnt
You won't get across
There are tongues that are tied
Speaking languages many
There are beggars on the ground
Saving every penny
But its running around
Rolling down the hill
And the mob is in town
On a bridge burning bill

Don't ask me for a reason
I have none to confess
Just time and the season
Of restlessness
Spring is coming
I can feel it on the tides
They must be turning
Because their burning bridges and brides
They're holding up the stick men to the flame
They are setting light their heads
In confusion and blame
And we're all done for
In the final name game
Nobody gets out alive
But their burning bridges just the same

You owe me your love

You owe me
I gave you all I had to give
Yes you owe me
I had to live the life I live
It wasn't as if I was running around
Blowing my roses all over town
I gave you it all even the thorn of my love
Oh now that prick in your conscience isn't enough?
You owe me your love

I've seen days when the rays don't come
Slow days that march to the beat of a drum
And many more besides these where the field marshall sung
Of things the army owes him
While another young man is hung

You owe me I want to scream
It is like living someone else's God forsaken dream
I've put everything I've had into this sinking ship
And its rolling to starboard and the cliffs are rising in the dip
Now don't say I never swam to your rescue
I always reached out my arm but now its me who needs you
You owe me, this life saving procedure
Cut out my heart resuscitate me from fever
And If you ever say that I'm the one who flew
Never forget all those handles that you threw
You never knocked, you never turned, you only shocked and then burned
Like a fuse that shortly blew
You owe me, I don't owe you

My heart breaks, it really does

My heart breaks it really does
It breaks like a wave on your shore
My heart is made of something more than this blood
This flood, these ropes that tighten
These cello strings, these harp's chords
My heart breaks, it really does
My heart like a vice for a crocodile
Like a purse for crocodile tears
As an oyster's shell holds pearls

My heart rolls you like grit
It hurts to rub you against its walls
One day Inside will look pearlesque and shiny
With your memories smeared
By my paintbrush of lies
My heart breaks it really does

My heart is a painting
It is a gallery of faces
It is an audience
An auditorium of eyes
Who stare at me accusingly
Like at the last judgement
When God asks what men
Have done with their lives
My heart breaks, it really does

And in its catheral organ of tubes
In its chambers and atrium
You are there singing your beautiful blues
Your Cantata of loves Equilibrium

Carnation hill

Maybe its colour of the red red rose
And maybe its the colour of the nation
Maybe its the colour of the road that goes
Maybe its time for vacation

Well I'm walking down the street in a certain pose
Raising my flag of damnation
Whoever told you that, he surely knows
There's only one road to salvation

Maybe its the colour of the dog at night
Maybe its the frost in the early morning bite
Maybe its the snow goose, maybe its the crow
Or maybe it just something I ought to know

Of Life and Death

I've seen you in the corner store
Next to the margarine
You were reciting Nietzsche's words
And the supreme human being
However the universal soldier
At the check out
Dropped his genes
Into the checkout girl's draw
And told her she was
Out of this scene
The director walked in all upperty
And wanted to settle a score
The producer had fallen in with the wrong sort
Of onions
And was known as 'cucumber obscene'
He said I'm not having this sort of carry on
In my show
You can go now,
But don't forget the blow
You owe me
Out back behind the bins
But he left under shadows of booms
Through the emergency exit
Behind a stack of magazines

Some time later the director
Was sitting in his chair
Interviewing a new actor
For the role of Fred Astair
So you say you can dance?
Well show me
Bring out the fast hearts
Lay your cards on the table
And the actor turned aces of faces
In his eyes
Black clubs made his boots
Diamonds stolen from skies
Sparkled over the spades of his shoes
And she knew
He had played his cards right

The next night
She was out there waiting for him
Ginger Rogers
In her costume
Of flowers in bloom
And colours like shrapnel
Splayed across the room
When she lifted her skirt hem
And swished like a balloon
All head and shoulder
and traction knee
All break a leg at the universal sodiers
Waiting in the quay
All sailors must love her space jamboree
And suck at their lamposts
Where she sings in the rain

It wasn't for love of money
That he stayed
You see the job was a good one
His days were arranged
And every brick of time numbered
Like in pyramids of the pharaohs
Egyptian mummies loved
To see their Cleopatre
And fathers and mothers all become
Strange when you think you don't
Their ancient histories
Yet it never comes out except when its laundered
No not the dirty money
The dirty mummy, silly
That's what I mean
And they reveal their mysteries
Inside a false magazine

We are Little Britain

Give me your answer
The bee is buzzing the rings are fastened
To the belt
The bells jingle
Like a thousand questions
That I've already answered before
Such silly dances these folk give
Without wanting to be twee
We British can't make a serious suggestion
Or connection with tradition
Which hasn't already been mocked
Or flogged to death on a debating floor
But over in Europe,
The individual is filled with somekind of power
Invested with some awe
By us British
Except the ones who are trying to rip them off
Make money from their children in summer schools

They have this otherness value that shields them
Like a shawl, a cloak of invisibility
If not of impenetrability
Which means everything they say has this extra weight
Even the everyday utterances
Even some cultural reference to a folk tradition
Is revered
But not in Britain,
Not about British traditions
Now let's be fair we mean the English
Scottish traditions have this cloak of protection
As do the Welsh and don't mention the Irish
But mention the English and it is quaint
Or silly or small and provincial
Though fiercely defended in the village
In the towns and cities they laugh and sneer
At such exhibitions of little england
Those little threads that tie
communities together
if that itself is not a clichéd or kitch concept

Spring time in the smoke

All the sexless numbskulls are trying to trip me up
In the forests of the evening and at the hour of the dusk
The candles they are leaning through the shadows of the tusk
And swallows tell their meaning in the narrows of the musk
Between the roof tops and the ceiling
Where they are all layed up
I think therefore I migrate,
I'm an immigrant of the brain
There are only seasons in the neural networks of the south
And the river flows with the blood of change
From its source right to its mouth
So silent, cold and unchanged
beneath the Danube rolls untouched

Can you clear a heart hole
Let the gold flow in its space
But no its full of pennies
And your heart strings are tied in knots
Nothing plays on the harp, the lute
The dulcet tones are strangely strained
And its all on waiting for the winter throes
Out in the fields of rain