Horrors of the Deep - Shriekback

Keep from us heartless tides of time:

The currents that will wreck you

On the continental shelf the water’s warm

The harbour walls protect you

After the levee breaks

The dead man’s fingers hold you

All the mermaids sing

They want you for their own

Their drowning arms enfold you

Gimme streets of lights and wine

Gimme better thorts than mine

My scratch-card god

Vouchsafe our souls to keep

From these periscopic sorrows

And the Horrors of the Deep

Sex on the beach is fine

All up for stimulation

But down at full fathom five

-Just to survive-

You need some inhalation

What does a poor boy do

When they all drag your name round town?

What the old men and the sea all said to me

Was quite enough to drag me down

Take it like a man

Or like the little bitch I am

I feel it now

I lay me down to sleep:

Suspect morals in the corals

And the Horrors of the Deep

Sumptuously poised here in the foam

A watery quintessence

Later pitifully trailing home alone

My bio-luminescence

Beached on the Kentish Knock

-So very far from Camden Town

And while Kraken dreams

The Little Mermaid sings her song of legs and sound

Out there in the bay

Where the salt will burn away

Your landlocked pride

-Out there such thought is cheap

Watch me holler in the squalor

With the Horrors of the Deep