Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a Blackheath cell Extinguishing the fires in a private hell Provoking the heartache to renew the licence Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience Wrapped in the christening shawl of a hangover Baptised in the tears from the real Drowning in the liquid seas on the Piccadilly line Rat race scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth Caress Ophelia's hand with breathstroke ambition An albatross in the maritime tradition Sheathed within the Walkman, wear the halo of distortion Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation She turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart She hung herself around my neck From the Time-Life-Guardians in their conscience bubbles Safe and dry in my sea of troubles Nine to five with suitable ties Cast adrift as their side-show, peepshow, stereo hero Becalm bestill, bewitch, drowning in the real The thief of Baghdad hides in Islington now Praying deportation for his sacred cow A legacy of romance from a twilight world The dowry of a relative mystery girl A Vietnamese flower, a Dockland union A mistress of release from a magazine's thighs Magdalenes contracts more than favours The feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat A son of a swastika of '45 parading a peroxide standard Graffiti disciples conjure testaments of hatred Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire hedges This is Brixton chess A knight for Embankment folds his newspaper castle A creature of habit, begs the boatman's coin He'll fade with old soldiers in the grease stained roll call And linger with the heartburn of Good Friday's last supper Son watches father scan obituary columns in search of absent school friends While his generation digests high fibre ignorance Cowering behind curtains and the taped up painted windows Decriminalised genocide, provided door to door Belsens Pandora's box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested heavens Waiting, the season of the bu*ton, the penultimate migration Radioactive perfumes, for the fashionably, for the terminally insane, insane Do you realise? Do you realise? Do you realise, this world is totally fugazi Where are the prophets, where are the visionaries, where are the poets To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary