Lyrics All These Strangers - Elvis Costello

All These Strangers

«Mistreat me darling and I might just disappear»
Upon freighter running dark out of Algiers
Put tiny grains in children’s tears
While taking 25% of all the flashbulbs and mementoes
From the mechanized divisions rolling over your frontiers
I saw my baby talking with another man today
Speaking softly in a confidential way
I saw a shadow pull his glove off
As a bluebird flew over
Life’s is no pleasure
When you doubt the one you love
Who Are All These Strangers?
I never will go back again
Go back into the past
For the flood is rising fast
You can break your window and look down
Into a muddy glass
It’s mirror or lens to burn
There was a deal done in Benghazi and Belgrade
Upon a scimitar or other crooked blade
Ransacks and loots, vacated suits
And pistol points but never shoots
Army sitting in a locomotive yard without their boots
Upstairs your man is painting the rain out in the street
Imagines woman that he’s destined still to meet
He’s trying sidetrack one to count on
Caught somewhere between countess or a courtesan
And it’s only love to feign and then it’s gone
He’s a privateer as dusk gets near
A brigand after dark, his victim lined with chalk
A corsair, filled with horsehair to the core
Dashed on your eyes of Adamantine
You despised his stripling whine
That little smudger and the mouthpiece that he’s with
Using his clause just like a practised fingersmith
I dreamed I took his digit prints
And then sewed then on a villain’s hands
Watched him ransom and demand
Until called the flatfoots in
Who Are All These Strangers?
All These Strangers
I sat down on a narrow bed
I thought about the things she said
All These Strangers
How I wished the night would never end
So tried to stop the days ahead
I’d carve her name down in the wood
Some small remembrance if I could