Lyrics SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter) - Scott Walker

SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)

This is my job,
I don’t come around and put out
your red light when you work.
Silence
What’s the matter,
didn’t you get enough attention at home?
Silence
If shit were music,
you’d be a brass band.
Silence
Know what?
You should get an agent,
why sit in the dark
handling yourself.
For Lavinia
who goes like
gynozoon.
IX I V IX III V I For the citizen
whose joke lays
in their hand.
I V I
V IX IX III
To play fugues
on Joves
Spam castanets.
V IX IX
I VI IX I Cattle are slaughtered,
Entrails examined,
spread out across the moon.
The Tisza is rising,
topless bars overflowing,
pulsing through the flumes.
Drop-kicked coloraturas
fouling my ears,
bypassing
an anorexic sky and-
-scar jumping grafters,
chorion-crying.
How can you stoop
so high?
For Papiria
who plops
the Pantheon.
IV VI IX
V I IX I For grosse Gauls
who wont leave
our sheep alone.
V I VII
IX I IX I Norsemen!
DO NOT!
eat the big pink mint.
Flush hard,
its a long way to Athens.
Gone
from your wooden palace.
The wild mice pelt clothes
slipped from my toes
where termites
scribble the walls.
Twisted forth,
and gone,
'Little father',
The 'snip' off your
nine-ninety-nine,
from where you groomed
yourself too small.
No more
dragging this wormy anus
round on shag piles from
Persia to Thrace.
I’ve severed
my reeking gonads,
fed them to your
shrunken face.
Janus head
its said,
will give good door.
IX IX V IX I IX I For a Roman who’s proof
that Greeks fucked bears.
V V IX
VII V IV I Heard this one?
This’ll kill ya,
about the ropes of hair
care of Venus the Bald
tugging Mercs across the plain.
Those measuring road-rashed bellies
a perte de vue to me night and day.
The one
about the saint
stranded high
upon his pillar.
Thirty summers,
Thirty winters,
his constant visitor,
his mother.
But he’d stare into the distance,
ignored her calls from down
below…
«DID YOU EVER THROW YOUR OWN
MOTHERS FOOD BACK AT HER?!»
«DID YOU EVER TELL HER,
TAKE THIS JUNK AWAY?!»
«WHAT KIND OF UNNATURAL SON
WOULD DO THAT TO HIS OWN
MOTHER?!»
…The tasteless one
about the bantam
who couldn’t climb a rung.
Your Helipolis is scrapheap.
Gone,
the brown slug
of your tongue.
For eunuch Ron
who sleeps at night
across the emperors
bedroom door.
III V IX
IX I V I Grostulating-Gorbi
requires fresh packing.
II IX V
I IV IX I OVER,
its over,
Syrinx screaming
all around,
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
Aquil-Aetos!
Aquil-Aetos!
screaming all around,
Filling up my life,
screaming all around.
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
OVER,
its over,
your Nibelung
can’t be found.
Their shadowless
shadows,
wiping me.
Wiping me clean
away.
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
Where’s;
the scent of pine torches,
the lumbering caravans,
the felt covered wagons, moving like galleons?
The 'wedgie', the 'melvy' to threaten the air?
Only fledge muffled
long hollow bone-drums
a beating.
The dark day behind us,
the dark day ahead
the wind drone across
skull goblets.
THEN,
Basel-cum-Strasbourg-cum-Frankfurt-cumSpeyer-cum…
I hear the only place your ever invited
is outside.
Silence
If brains were rain, you’d surely
be a desert.
Silence
Look, don’t go to a mind reader,
go to a palmist;
I know you’ve got a palm.
Silence
Does your face hurt?
cuz its killing me.
CUT;
to Lost Lumbago City.
I am perched
against the sky.
A banner shoal of sparrows
sways in the twilight.
Down there,
as ish kabibble’s
schlepp the shade
forever,
earths hoary
fontenelle
weeps softly
for a thumb thrust.
A chorus of threadbare
black-stockinged legs
is fanning out
into a frazzled black
rose.
No phalanxes fleeing
like zippers of blood,
red plumes nodding
between the horses
ears.
HEY BUDDY!
GIVE IT UP!
HEY PAL!
COME DOWN!
JOIN THE LIVING!
WANTED!
A LISPING, HOBBLING, NOSELESS
RUNT.
Phone IX IX IX
IX IX IX I.
REMEMBER:
'SOMEDAY YOU’LL GO FAR
IF YOU CATCH THE RIGHT
TRAIN'?
HOW ABOUT,
'YOU'RE SO FAT,
WHEN YOU WEAR A YELLOW
RAINCOAT, PEOPLE SCREAM
TAXI?'
THEN THERE’S,
'YOU'RE SO BORING
THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN ENTERTAIN DOUBT'.
I’ll grease
this pole
behind me.
Grease this pole
behind me.
Grease this pole.
Grease this pole.
There’s an unfinished rumour
doing the rounds.
It seems the storks are seen
returning to the rooftops.
Carrying back their children.
Clacking like dried palms.
Loud enough to be heard
from Reims to Orleans.
River banks are cleared.
Bridges retaken.
Oblivion,
driven from the city
street by street.
So why
have screams of laughter,
the pissing stench
of mares-milk beer
come to bait
your toad down
from his toadstool?
And if
I’m melancholic.
And if I shed a tear…
'Don't forget to blink,
lest your eyeballs dry up, fall out
of their sockets and dangle on your
cheeks like Caesar’s shrivelled
coglione'.
…its when I hear
a sawed-off coffin rolls
beneath the Tisza
HEY BAR!
Ah, my noblest music.
HEY!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
HEY BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
BAR!
I’ll grease
this pole
behind me.
Grease this
pole behind
me.
Grease this
pole…
Grease this
po…
OVER,
its over,
but where’s
the electrons
squeezing all around?
Burning up my life.
Squeezing all around.
OVER,
its over,
Only freezing
all around.
I greased
that pole
behind me.
Greased
that pole
behind me.
Your Nibelung
can’t be found.
I’ve looked high and low for you,
I guess I didn’t look low enough.
Don’t move:
I want to forget you just the way
you are.
I really hope your face clears up.
You know;
I think you’ve got nothing there.
Infrared, infrared.
I could
drop
into
the
darkness.
Its so cold,
Infrared.
What if I freeze,
and
drop
into
the
darkness?