Fight

Flying blind

I alway forget how crazy things are

So sometimes it catches me off my guard

When they make sense

The line on the road trail the arrow in the sky

I search for the mote in my brother's eye

Beneath the pence

A time of blunt instruments

Still uncertain when I've woken

Or what constitutes a conscious mind

Though the thought remains unspoken

I know I'm flying blind

Breaking into cold sweat on the white-hot coals

The pennies from heaven drop through my soul

It don't relent

At the back end of dreams I'm amazed to awake

I offer my theories but just can't shake

That seventh sense

To which there's no defense

It seemed the time was for action

It seemed so cool to be that kind

My tongue writhed to form some retraction

But I knew

I was flying blind

I want things to be fast, down to the power-drive

I want the zero-gravity heroes to play dead

But stay alive

We want it to be slow, all the way to stall

We talk about a thousand things that never change at all

No, it never change

It was then that I knew I'd been thoughtless -

Something had slipped my mind

I'd strapped myself into the fortress

But the fortress was flying blind

We got full clearance, so someone down there

Ought to know the truth of our disappearance -

If even that still shows it accuses and blames me

But nothing was quite what it seemed

Sometimes things work out so strangely

That it might as well all be dreamed

The white cane fandango

The white cane fandango in morse code

Try to shake through the message

Shake the load

Only venial sin, running on the spot -

Till the dance begins

Where does a man go when the muscles cramp?

Try to write out a postcard on a postage stamp

With a drawing pin punching out the braille

For the whole within?

Upset the contango on your future stock

Paying backwardation, hold onto what you've got -

Such a sideways grin! Some day you may need

To trade that in

If we ride this right

The future will fall in our hands

If we survive the flight

The future will work out -

Nothing's that black and white

Control

The colour-coded charts are spread

But we're still gliding deep into the red

The radio is dead

Every valve blown open

The radar screen flicks monochrome

Air traffic controller wants to get on home

Waiting

For a phone call

To release him from responsibility

Nobody goes to see him any more

Except for the man from the ministry

He wanted to be, he wanted to be

The man at the helm, in command of the flightpath

He's flying a chair, quite beyond control

He's going to have just one more chance

At a barrel roll

All in a dream, all as a dream

The colours too bright, the music too deafening -

The black-out world has just begun to show

These cracked-out words I offer

But I still don't know

Cool blue suffuse the colour gun -

Oh come in, come in number one

Your time's nearly run

Speed-freeze the frame

The present and the past hold fast

It's too fast, the thing don't

The thing won't

The thing don't last

Cockpit

The rolling dice clash together never make up the score

That old device, the ejector seat, glued to the floor

Everybody waits for everyone to make a show -

No-one wants to be the first, admitting that they know

How anythings that's gone down here

Could fit into an analytic groove

W

Ait for the tactical move

Wait for some action we all can approve

Too much to drink, for the cup reaches down to the sea

Too much to think, the barometer pressuring me

Rolling down the weather for an easter parade

Reeling out the maydays in the hope of being saved

But the radio ham's out giving blood -

No, no, no, he's not listening

The cricketer knows his "wisden"

The pilot has got his "jane's"

But the sum of this factual wisdom

Don't help us to fly the plane

(No, and it never will...)

Beneath the tartan two-piece something rips undone

Wait for the ladder to run

Wait for the snake that the ladder becomes

A passenger hits the cockpit, willing to chance his game

Pulls out his gun and cocks it

In the hope that it all might change. (oh, but it never will...)

A fly-leaf from the library shows others have been here before

Tried, failed and kicked out the door

The aircrew don't care anymore -

Not they just wait

For the beat of the silk-worm wing

Wait for the heat to come down on us

- Full force of the law

Silk-worm wings

Full force of gravity pulls me down

I'll be better off out of there

Aerobatic spin around

I'll take my chances in the open air

Sycamore silk-worm wings

Or roman candle to the ground

There's only one thing for shure

When the balloon goes up

The aeronaut calm down

He say nothing is quite what it seems

He say nothing is quite what it seems

I say nothing is nothing

A black box

Softly, the angels sing their time and space refrain

There's something in everything if you can only pin down its name

Aerobatic thoughts at the back of my mind -

Is it nothing but the looping line we all follow?

Nothing but the spiral twist of dna

There'll be no looking back from tomorrow on today

So the wire is tripped, split-seconds defect to their successors

The umbilical cord is ripped -

Here we all are in free fall

I stall where I am, as if to see where I've been

Only running down the looping line we all follow

Only chasing down the spiral twist of dna -

There can be no looking on to tomorrow from today

Life/death/night/day - cold breath will surely fly away

Is the empire of sensation locked in a black box

Deep in me, encoded there somehow?

It fires the imagination to fly on a wing and a prayer

Through my life

- Is that how it is?

There'll be no looking back on this

This is now, which will be then -

Is this the means? All I know for shure is

This is the end

No looking back from tomorrow

No, there'll be no looking back on today

Better be looking on to tomorrow

Better think on today