Faint Heart And The Sermon - Peter Hammill

With my face drained of colour

And my brain of blood

Like Billy Budd

I’m lashed to the grating;

With senses growing duller

And with quaking heart

I make a start

At temperature equating

And my lungs suck useless air

Like paraplegic dancers

In formation team

My understanding seems

Hiidebound in its movements

Contemplating answers

That could break my bonds--

To be half wrong

Would be, in me, improvement…

But my comprehensive faculties are impaired

And it seems absurd, but now all I’ve heard

Fades in empty words and is worthless

As the Human Laugh rocks the cenotaph

But the joke is half-true, and mirthless

Trying to trace a reason

From the spinning words

But all I’ve heard

Seem at odds with their meanings

Phonetically pleasing

But delivered in such haste

That in their place

My mind commences screaming

On the verge of belief I crash onto the reef

And a cynical thief steals my senses

So I cling to the pew with dimensions askew

And recognition refuses present tenses

All the lives of the saints demonstrate that my faint

Is a minor complaint, but the end is

Nowhere in sight

Why can’t I find me a way to go?

I don’t want to die in the nave

But I know it may be with me some day

So I’ve got to find a way I can save up

My evergies, and find a cause to pray

So something for something

To which I can give my creed…

I’d gladly succumb to the wave

If I thought the water taught a way to light;

I’d gladly succumb--I'm not brave

And it’s easy to believe what the preacher says

Except for the conflict raging between my head

And my brain

I don’t want to die, but just the same--

Some day…

Waiting for that moment

That I know will come

When I’ll have to run

And find another sermon…

Everyman and Norman

And the talking priest--

Still, I am at least

Holding all the doors open

Inside me all outside is shared

As the cracked bells peal it all seems unreal

But the seventh seal stays unbroken

And the Offertory plate tenders no escape--

Still I refuse to scrape up a token

Of esteem for these false

Alleyways of the course;

I must try to divorce sense from sensing

Tell me again

Tell me the way to go

So when I talk to myself

Although I take good care to listen

My heart grows ever more faint--

There’s something missing?