(Fish / Marillion)

Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a blackheath cell
Extinguishing the fires in a private hell
Provoking the heartache to renew the licence

Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule
Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience
Wrapped in the christening shawl of a hangover
Baptised in the tears from the real
Tears from the real

Drowning in the liquid seize on the Piccadilly line, rat race
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth
Caress Ophelias hand with breathstroke ambition
An albatross in the marrytime tradition
Sheathed within the walkman wear the halo of distortion
Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation
She turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart
She hung herself around my neck

From the Time-Life-Guardians in their conscience bubbles
Safe and dry in my sea of troubles
Nine to five with suitable ties
Cast adrift as their sideshow, peepshow, stereo hero
Becalm bestill, bewitch
Drowning in the real

The thief of Baghdad hides in Islingtown now
Praying deportation for his sacred cow
A legacy of romance from a twilight world
The dowry of a relative mystery girl
A Vietnamese flower, a dockland union
A mistress of release from a magazine's thighs
Magdalenes contracts more than favours
The feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat

A son of a swastika of '45 parading a peroxide standard
Graffiti disciples conjure testaments of hatred
Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire hedges
This is Brixton chess
A knight for Embankment folds his newspaper castle
A creature of habit, begs the boatman's coin
He'll fade with old soldiers in the grease stained roll call
And linger with the heartburn of Good Friday's last supper

Son watches father scan obituary columns in search of absent school friends
While his generation digests high fibre ignorance
Cowering behind curtains and the taped up painted windows
Decriminalised genocide, provided door to door Belsens
Pandora's box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested heavens
Waiting, wai-wai-waiting, the season of the button
The penultimate migration
Radioactive perfumes
For the fashionably
For the terminally insane, insane
D-d-do you realise?
D-d-do you realise?
D-d-do you realise, this world is totally fugazi

Where are the prophets
Where are the visionaries
Where are the poets
To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary