copyright 1980, 1981 Robin Williamson

From faded newsprint used to wrap a fish

Inscrutably the muse selects your face

While I sit drinking namelessly in a nameless bar

Five thousand miles and thirty years away



With all the usual ceremonial you were crowned one night

King of the field where doctors nail the cows

To make of the cock's quill the right of language

And the pricking heart a sword against the hours



Let smirking scholars writhe in their favoured bondage

To hold you plaintiff to the charge of art

Exhibit A: he falls on legendary lines

Singing mother I want a bullet in the heart



The judge in me sucks eggs and jerks the sacred meat

For the boy in me still dreams in Milk Wood town

Like two provincial bastards playing the galleries

I hold your photo to the mirror upside down



As bacon wafts through hungry streets, your ghost pervades

Just like an old ex-boxer aged twenty two

Staged up like Falstaff or the wild Welsh Rimbaud

You'd laugh to see these monochromes they make of you



Ah Mr. Thomas let us ramble through the midnight fair

Let us throw old bottles at the ferris wheel

Let us paint library on the library let us raid the moonlight

Let us steal away whatever we are supposed to steal



While the border guards check cards with their poker faces

Never mind who is winning but the stakes are rare

If this jack of thorns they let us hold outbids the joker

Let us sneak higher till the frost clings in our hair



Let us watch while the days grow daily more mundane

That rough god go striding with his shears

Hack wide the bellies of the swollen mountains

And rip molten heroes forth to their furious tears





Notes from Art Siegel:

Van released this as a B-side in the early 80's. A different version, though obviously from the same session, appears on The Philosopher's Stone. Some of the verses are different in the different versions.

Van does make some minor changes in the lyrics, such as drinking famously in an Irish bar in the first verse and .... having the rough god go riding (rather than striding) in another. Also, mother I want a bullet in the heart becomes mother I don't want a pain here in my heart. Overall, he stays true to Robin Williamson's original words, and adds the choruses, but he doesn't sing the verse about the border guards in either version.