For whom did you chisel That line in the sea One side for the drowning One side for the free?

Take a seat, half a seat, Mrs. Married Mr. Multiply, divide This information in between you Like a gift, a lost and found, burgeoning Wallet full of spiders Your child has the heart The heart of a poet But we have ways Of correcting that now Have a light, not that kind Of a light – you can’t smoke This kind of fire The lizard clothes: you must dispose, Leave collapsed, silver foil by the basin An egg a day will slowly make the morning birds All sing the same Your child has the heart The heart of a poet But we have ways Of correcting that now You’re not alone, Mrs. Stone, Mr. Stone, You’re only stones in deed and in thinking And you’ll confuse the light ascending For all of your sinking So have a word, half a word You’re half of him, he’s half of her And form one collision This is where the love is made And it will feel Like a surgeon's incision Your child has the heart The heart of a poet But we have ways Of correcting that now Yes, we have ways Of correcting that now

I found him hiding in the desert, in Camp 200X Where you can tell how quickly everyone shot through Food still in the cupboards, keys still in the trucks Four years of eerie dust in every room Some secrets never let you go Absent Without Leave We were told, with him, to use whatever means He said, I am Bluey Williams, they can stick their 20 shillings I’m renouncing all allegiance to the Queen Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the sand Rule Britannia, down to every last man He said, I knew a sailor who saw the first bomb So hot it turned the beaches into glass Fields of fish with eyes imploring were floating on the water The crew that day had such an easy catch Then they shipped me inland and I saw my first one too A light just like the coming of the Lord The Brits were over-dressed, of course, like spacemen for the show And we were just in singlets and our shorts Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the cloud Fists in your eyes, men, and turn to face about Now everyone in country knows of the black mist That killed the trees and made the children sick Bluey said we used to trade with fellas camped out in the craters That sure as hell made all our counters tick But the officers would tell you there’s nothing here of value Just empty miles of nowhere else to go And warn, you never saw those blacks, we’re trying to fight the Reds For the Empire of the white man, Blue Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the dirt Rule Britannia, and everyone must serve Bluey said he wasn’t coming back to base with me Let my prison be to walk this poison land So I said I never saw him, but I see him every night Fallen teeth and weeping sores upon his skin And I wonder about my daughter, still-born and whisked away And son, who’ll never walk nor ever speak You know, for all their testing, the doctors never let me Know the single, simple answer that I seek Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the world Rule Britannia, down to every boy and girl Rule Britannia, Britannia rules us all Rule Britannia, we can’t ever let her fall.

I have begun to pay back my life in installments Twentysix fifty a month - That's a pint of lager and a parmigiana That's a second-hand treasure from the record shop I'm doing well, saving a life by the change in My pockets, just six dollars eighty a week That's two cups of coffee please or Half a pack of guitar strings (I'll pay you the other half right after the gig) A penny for your smile, my friend A penny for your cheer A penny for your warm embrace When I become a millionaire A dollar a day is barely a ripple There's hundreds in the fountain, thrown for a lark Where the lovers dip their toes And wet their hair and their clothes The heads and the tails glisten like stars A dollar a day's a sweet little bargain You can't even buy decent candy for that You can find it in a payphone Or the tubs at the laundromat Or the curbs at the bars where the punters Spilled into cabs A penny for your smile, my friend A penny for your cheer A penny for your warm embrace When I become a millionaire I have begun to pay back my life in installments Three hundred dollars a year That's a ticket to Dylan, dinner and a show Or a visit for X-rays, just so we know A penny aside for your smile, my friend A penny for your cheer A penny for your warm embrace When I become a millionaire A penny for your smile, my friend A penny for your cheer A penny for your warm embrace When I become a millionaire

Mr Williams putt-putted a small boat out through the heads slipped over the side pulled the dark dark sea around him and emerged on land as Mr Jones the pale, kept-to-himself new neighbor of Mrs Williams, widow with her brand-new car and, finally sending the kids to a “good school”. word around the clothes lines and fruit-vined fences was something's going on but who are we to poke our noses? a million, they say, the insurance claim, and paid though they never found a body so Future First Mutual kept the change. those moonlit nights she would steal out through the hedge and slip down his blinds her husband, this man never so alive than since he was dead each kiss each kiss the invention of breath and breathless each kiss would revive them. but change or no change, there would be deeming and claiming in the craws of the neighbors that the widow Williams must have been faking and fraud! fraud! a million times fraud! they all cried have you no shame, Williams and Jones no sense of the value of human life? it’s people like you make our premiums high and Mr Williams, exhumed, spent six years inside and Mrs Williams resumed counting the nights like coins into piles for the bills. Future First Mutual tut-tutted through their people their balance restored like a hole in the water and later bought-in to Wexton and Co. engineers of those precision drones that can wipe out a whole wedding for just six million a go

There are weights in the pockets Of the coats in the hall Ways of those who returned Who had stayed To wrap the lamplight walls Round their shoulders Through the webs of their fingers And their thumbs Stay the gallows of the garden sheds and stay Away from the water's edge In the fallout zone The flowers still grow But there will be no more Love me, nor ever not to love There are days between lines Colored out of the squares Of the weeks, of the months Days that strayed and caked themselves in clay Second skins to shed in place Of bodies folded away Second winds, who will roar Howl and bay, and need some place to stay In the fallout zone The flowers still grow But there will be no more Love me, nor ever not to love There is time in the earth You can smell when the rain Drags its nails through the soil A scattered sea just trying to be whole again There are husks hidden down Who had staked all their love On those few tiny drums who only knew The one song that would break through In the fallout zone The flowers all know The wait underground is so long (and that is why we glow) In the fallout zone The flowers still grow But there will be no more Love me, nor ever not to love

The trouble with beer is it's made out of water And the trouble with water is clear Every drop of blood spilled and ran to the river Is still bound inside it somewhere And I see by the stacking of chairs that it's time Oh, Time, time is the trouble with water Whittled through reeds and dragged over rocks Aparted and dumped in the sea Rolled north and south in the swells and then found Froze and adrift centuries And I see by the stacking of chairs that it's time Oh, Time, time is the trouble with water Thawed and risen and tumbled by storm Or banded in mist round the mountain range And returned to the streams in that murmuring sound The sounding of forgotten names And I see by the stacking of chairs that it's time Oh, Time, time is the trouble with water And I see by the stacking of chairs that it's time But I just can't go out in the rain

Behind me, inside, the water coolers hum Like spools of thread unwinding To count the fathoms down the corridors To your shape beneath the linen Around my shoes, a congress of sparrows Saying Grace Grace The crumblight on my face Is all that I have today The flower stall is rolling up the roller doors Awake, all my lilium companions They must know me by sight and the perfume of my clothes My bouquet strong from ageing Peppering my view, a confidence of sparrows Saying Grace Grace There but for your face We'd not be here today The short husky breath of the glass sliding doors Who are learning your name now And the call of the cooler water up the elevator floors Another mark, another day now How can I tell you about the scattering of sparrows Saying Grace Grace Here's sunlight for your face Until we meet again Saying Grace Grace Here's sunlight for your face?

Last night I think I travelled, in the deepest hour of sleep, To a side of your fence unfamiliar, but exactly how it would be The driveway meets me, two arms outreached And the house a stone in the hand And I stand in the mist that I make from my breath And my moon-made tinder of skin Will you take me down to the river Of icy depths unknown, Our bodies afire, but we’ll have no fear, For people destined to burn can never drown For people destined to burn can never drown I hear your feet in the hallway, treading beneath every sound Your gaolers scraping, turning in their linen, like silent snakes over ground, Matchmakers who sleep with torches to keep Every shadow aware of its name, Do they know love has found you by how lately the walls Have been throwing your cast away? Will you take me down to the river Of icy depths unknown, Our bodies afire, but we’ll have no fear, For people destined to burn can never drown For people destined to burn can never drown But last night I believe that I travelled, awaking all furrowed and cold, Laid on a crude mess of timber and strewn above me our tangles of cloth I hear in the mist that hangs like a kiss, unrequited above your mouth A parting of water and the call of some traveller Who will turn all my norths into south Are you taking him down to the river Of icy depths unknown, Your bodies afire, but you’ll have no fear, For people destined to burn can never drown For people destined to burn can never drown No people destined to burn can ever drown

will I shimmer like a cello found the hairs wound to almost breaking could devolve into a music? love commands us to be human skin is only skin a word in any language is just a word if I shimmer like a cello knows the creak and groan of a long forgotten bough how can I return from this comb my hair and slide my arms back there into my coat? What a tiny drum is love A skin so worn and yet Just when you think The rhythm's lost It calls you up To know That you are breathing

I caught a glimpse in the mirror As our limbs were tangled and writhed And I saw that our skin’s become heavy Like folds in a mountain side The old dresser photos were rattling Our two young faces in frames And I stared and I wondered if they wondered too Who’d be first to look away Will we come to know this feeling, My old lover, my old friend, Come to know it like the backs of our hands Or to know it like some secret place Where you go to start again? This twilit room cupped our bodies Like a river wound in a ball The upstream and down kissed at the creases Our north become south become lost Will we come to feel this, knowing, My old lover, my old friend, That all those little histories that we tend To covet oh so dearly can’t come with us in the end I caught a glimpse in the mirror Of two old hands in repose And they stared and they wondered if I wondered too Just who will be first to know If we’ll come to be so willing My old lover, my old friend, To know each other like the backs of our hands And still go down to that secret place When we need to start again

It must have been strange when you were young We've seen the pictures and we've read about it For the sake of some sludge in the ground All the bombs and the guns And the clouds rained with blood Were you scared, Grandma? What was it like in those days? We try and try to comprehend For the sake of the color of someone's skin The walls and the wire and the churches on fire Were you there, Grandma? Children of my children I am the lucky one To have found you in a better world Than I have come from But, children, keep asking questions For there never was a day When history wasn't trying to make The same mistakes We've read about The Great Decline Where you saw forests fall and oceans rise And angry old men in their towers high Buy and burn, and burn and buy all a man could buy Till he ran out of time It must have been sad in his time For the sake of a face pressed into coins For the sake of some imaginary lines in the sea There washed onto shores all those lost girls and boys Not much younger than we Children of my children I never felt so strong Than to know you ask this of me Of a world we've not passed on But, children, keep asking questions For I never knew a day When history wasn't trying to make The same mistakes

Our arms remember everything So the world fills with holes Shaped the way that people were In their last known repose And our toes remember everything So the sand down to the shore Parts itself just wide enough For our secrets to be heard The breeze will see you from the road The birds will eye you from the pier And the waves will speak in velvet tongues That you have never known And the sea will take it from here As if to try her buoyancy The ocean fills with holes And the holes all filled with ocean are Still keeping her afloat Forgetting and remembrance They are not so opposed A memory stays, a memory weighs As empty as it does full The mist will trace your braced form And the shells will hold you to their ears And the waves will find the measure of your quickened poet heart And the sea will take it from here Our arms remember everything So the world fills with holes Shaped the way that people were In their last known repose And the breeze will fill your folded clothes Your shoes at rest to hold them there But this time I will arrive in time to cast this memory free And for the sea to take it from here For the sea to take it from here