Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a blackheath cell
Extinguishing the fires in my private hell
Provoking the heartache to renew the license
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
Baptized in tears from the real

Drowning in the liquid seize on the piccadilly line, rat-race
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth
Caress ophelia's hand with breaststroke ambition
The albatross courtship marrytime tradition
Sheathed with the walkman wear the halo of distortion
Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation

But 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 fives, with suitable ties
While I'm cast adrift as their sideshow, peepshow, stereo hero
Becalm, bestill, bewitch, drowning, drowning in the real

The thief of baghdad hides in islington 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
This magdalene contracts more than favours
The feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat

A son of the swastika of '45, parading a peroxide standard
Graffitti disciples conjure testaments of hatred
Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire hedges
This is brixton chess

A knight for embankments 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
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
Decriminalized genocide, provided door-to-door belsens
Pandora's box of holocausts
Gracefully cruising satellite-infested heavens
Waiting, the season of the button
The penultimate migration
Radioactive perfumes for the fashionably
For the terminally insane, insane

Do you realise, do you realise, 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?