Drunken Boat

The wind was whipping shingle through the windows in the town

A hail of stones across the roof, the slates came raining down

A blade of light upon the spit came sweeping through the roar

With me head inise a barrel and me leg screwed in the floor

Mother pack me bags because I'm off to foreign parts

Don't ask me where I'm going 'cause I'm sure it's off the charts

I'll pin your likeness on the wall right buy my sleeping head

I'll send you cards and letters so you'll know that I'm not dead

By this time in a week I should be far away from home

Trailing fingers through the phospor or asleep in flowers of foam

From Macao to Acapulco from Havana to Seville

We'll see monoliths and bridges and the Christ up on the hill

An aria with the Russians at the piano in the bar

With icefloes through the window we raised glasses to the Czar

We squared off on a dockside with a coupled hundred Finns

And we dallied in the 'dilly and we stoaked ourselves in gin

Now the only deck I'd want to walk

Are the stalks of corn beneath my feet

And the only sea I want to sail

Is the darkned pond in the scented dusk

Where a kid crouced full of sadness

Lets his boat go drifting out

Into the evening sun

We sailed through constellations and were rutted by the storm

I crumpled under cudgel blows and finally came ashore

I spent the next two years or more just staring at the wall

We went to sea to see the world and what d'you think we saw?

If we turned the table upside down and sailed around the bed

Clamped knives between our teeth and tied bandannas round our heads

With the wainscot our horizon and the ceiling as the sky

You'd not expect that anyone would go and fucking die

At nights we passed the bottle round and drank to our lost friends

We lay alone upon our bunks and prayed that this would end

A wall of moving shadows with rows of swinging keys

We dreamed that whole Leviathans lay rotting in the weeds

There's a sound that comes from miles away if you lean your head to hear

A ship's bell rings on board a wreck where the air is still and clear

And up in heaven that means another angel's got his wings

But all below it signifies is a ship's gone in the drink