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The wind was whipping shingle through the windows in the town |
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A hail of stones across the roof, the slates came raining down |
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A blade of light upon the spit came sweeping through the roar |
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With me head inise a barrel and me leg screwed in the floor |
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Mother pack me bags because I'm off to foreign parts |
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Don't ask me where I'm going 'cause I'm sure it's off the charts |
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I'll pin your likeness on the wall right buy my sleeping head |
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I'll send you cards and letters so you'll know that I'm not dead |
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By this time in a week I should be far away from home |
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Trailing fingers through the phospor or asleep in flowers of foam |
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From Macao to Acapulco from Havana to Seville |
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We'll see monoliths and bridges and the Christ up on the hill |
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An aria with the Russians at the piano in the bar |
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With icefloes through the window we raised glasses to the Czar |
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We squared off on a dockside with a coupled hundred Finns |
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And we dallied in the 'dilly and we stoaked ourselves in gin |
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Now the only deck I'd want to walk |
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Are the stalks of corn beneath my feet |
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And the only sea I want to sail |
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Is the darkned pond in the scented dusk |
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Where a kid crouced full of sadness |
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Lets his boat go drifting out |
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Into the evening sun |
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We sailed through constellations and were rutted by the storm |
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I crumpled under cudgel blows and finally came ashore |
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I spent the next two years or more just staring at the wall |
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We went to sea to see the world and what d'you think we saw? |
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If we turned the table upside down and sailed around the bed |
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Clamped knives between our teeth and tied bandannas round our heads |
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With the wainscot our horizon and the ceiling as the sky |
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You'd not expect that anyone would go and fucking die |
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At nights we passed the bottle round and drank to our lost friends |
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We lay alone upon our bunks and prayed that this would end |
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A wall of moving shadows with rows of swinging keys |
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We dreamed that whole Leviathans lay rotting in the weeds |
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There's a sound that comes from miles away if you lean your head to hear |
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A ship's bell rings on board a wreck where the air is still and clear |
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And up in heaven that means another angel's got his wings |
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But all below it signifies is a ship's gone in the drink |