Lyrics Modern - Peter Hammill

Modern

Jericho’s strange, throbbing with life at its heart:
people are drawn together, simultaneously torn apart…
Foundations are shattered in the city
inside the barricaded doors -----
hiding behind their walls, lonely as night falls,
maybe the people are waiting for trumpets…
Babylon’s strange, seventh wonder of the earth:
gardens ablaze in colour, slowly rotting in the dirt
and, with your head on fire, you can’t really see.
The hanging gardens sing,
but with a hollow ring:
the life is false, its killing me…
Don’t look back, or you’ll turn to stone;
look around before your life is overgrown
with concrete slabs!
On your back the searching eyes that stab
between chintz curtains, glinting,
but never owning to a name -------
like the inmates of asylums
all the citizens are contagiously
insane…
Atlantis is strange, the explosion of an age:
no-one really knows what to do, and the city
is a cage.
It traps in ashen hours and concrete towers,
imprisons in the social order:
the city’s lost its way,
madness takes hold today…
I can’t live under water