Momus - 2pm lyrics
Post morning, pre-mortem I promised the ghost of Meleager I would marry Deianira So I went to Calydon where Oeneus was king Stopping to fight the river god Achelous on the way I won when I broke his horn In the pyramid at Giza I become lost in a succession of chambers I am blind like Homer yet strangely I still see Screenprinted cows and silver foil Gigantic ants scuttling on a motherboard While I sew with Ariadne, the white rabbit Scurries away down next door's burrow Two in the afternoon In an ephemeral hospital The radio therapy ward is filled with tiny lights A pile of dim barely perceptible earth in a heap And spiritual distant music At two in the afternoon I wander in Venice with Von Aschenbach Seeking a lost child in a red cape Coughing blood And the swine of Circe come running to their d**hs Maddened by the singing of the sirens Winter fog rolling in off the lido Sometimes a god crosses your path here unannounced In the pyramid the mummy grows mouldy at the last At two in the afternoon Haile Sela**i orders a stamp collection to be brought Lifts the stamps with tweezers and places them back I leave him to his pastime For time will probably pa** regardless I strike out from Alexandria to the Athenian apartment Of my ninth year Lycabetus blasted in monastic rock The hot mountains snow capped with marble Dust storms over Psychico Lime Cordial on Eucalyptus Square Where is it now? And where also my Parisian child bride? Into the sea they flow With Villon's medieval snow Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon Three at evening, Flat on our backs by dawn Two in the afternoon Gracchus the hunter joins me now He offers me the oars and I row From one Greek island to the next While Gracchus writes, if it be possible so deep in d**h to write The secrets of the world In the margins of a little girl's spidery pencilled Spice Girls scrapbook Picked up from the ground in Hackney The crows of Tokyo are sombre umbrellas Flapping atop telegraph poles in the rainy season A writer hurries by dressed in a restrained check pattern Composing in his head the 31st syllable of a tanka Leigh Bowery is sitting at his sewing machine Corpulent, pale eyed Flash forward: he is stammering "a few more days" As they threaten to turn off his life support machine And the ECG bleep goes spastic Slavic women decorate their anguish with ullulations The mongolian terror is fresh in their memories Grim dawn comes from the east bringing carrion Over the gra** of the highlands Gulls girn, denouncing all culprits The skull prickles, the hairs rise Poe indulges in voluptuous melancholia, polysyllabic Like the gra** the horsemen know We perish For me it's 2PM For the moment life goes on And the Minotaur plays Nintendo Basho squats before the emperor The former thirteen and a half year old genius Exposes himself in a subway pa**age To a halfwit girl he scares half out of her wits As Brahms completes his Requiem Shakespeare and the Bishop Of Winchester Are teasing the fraus in the stews of Southwark They are baiting bears in the nearby pit The arena has been flooded Shakespeare and the Bishop take their seats for the re-enactment of The sea battle between the Genji and Haike The imperial boat is already on fire The battle was lost centuries before Deianira agrees to be my wife We purchase an ivy green Lexus, flagship of the range And live, discreetly luxurious, in a premier shell loft conversion in the Hollywood hills The converted observatory at Palo Alto Three at evening, Flat on our backs by dawn For me it's 2PM For the moment life goes on Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon Three at evening Flat on our backs by dawn .....