Lyrics Reconstructed: Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song - Todd Rundgren

Reconstructed: Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song

Love unrequited, robs me of me rest
Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers
Love, nightmare like, lies heavy on me chest
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers
When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and
Repose is taboo’d by anxiety
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without
impropriety;
For your brain is on fire, the bed-clothes conspire of usual slumber to plunder
you:
First your counter-pane goes, and uncovers your toes
And your sheet slips demurely from under you;
Then the blanketing tickles, you feel like mixed pickles
So terribly sharp is the pricking
And you’re hot and you’re cross, and you tumble and toss
'Til there’s nothing 'twixt you and the ticking
Then the bed-clothes all creep to the ground in a heap
And you pick 'em all up in a tangle;
Next your pillow resigns and politely declines to
Remain at it’s usual angle!
Well, you get some repose in the form of a dose
With hot eye-balls and head ever aching
But your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams
That you’d very much better be waking;
For you dream you are crossing the channel, and
Tossing about in a steamer from Harwich
Which is something between a large bathing machine and
A very small second class carriage
And you’re sucking a treat (penny ice and cold meat)
To a party of friends and relations
They’re a ravenous horde, and they all come on board
At Sloane Square and South Kensington stations
And bound on that journey you find your attorney
Who started that morning from Devon;
He’s a bit undersiz’d and you don’t feel surpris’d
When he tells you he’s only eleven
Well you’re driving like mad with this singular lad
(By the bye the ship’s now a four wheeler)
And you’re playing round games, and he calls you bad names When you tell him
that «ties pay the dealer»;
But this you can’t stand so you throw up your hand
And you find you’re as cold as an icicle;
In your shirt and your socks (the black silk with gold clocks) Crossing
Sal’sbury Plain on a bicycle:
And he and the crew are on bicycles too
Which they’ve somehow or other invested in
And he’s telling the tars all the particulars
Of a company he’s interested in;
It’s a scheme of devices, to get at low prices
All good from cough mixtures to cables which tickled the sailors
By treating retailers as though they were all vegetables;
You get a good spadesman to plant a small tradesman
(First take off his boots with a boot tree)
And his legs will take root, and his fingers will shoot
And they’ll blossom and bud like a fruit tree;
From the green grocer tree
You get grapes and green pea, cauliflower, pine apple and cranberries
While the pastry cook plant cherry brandy
Will grant apple puffs, and three corners, and banburys;
The shares are a penny and ever so many
Are taken by Rothschild and Baring
And just as a few are allotted to you
You awake and with a shudder despairing
You’re a regular wreck, with a crick in your neck, and
No wonder you snore, for your head’s on the floor
And you’ve needles and pins from your soles to your shins
And your flesh is acreep, for your left leg’s asleep
A cramp in your toes, and a fly on your nose
And some fluff in your lung, and a feverish tongue
And a thirst that’s intense
The general sense that you haven’t been sleeping in clover;
But the darkness has pass’d, and it’s daylight at last
And the night has been long, ditto, ditto my song
And thank goodness they’re both of them over!