The town has roofs of slate
And the town has roofs of felt
There's two distinct environments
The natural, the built
From the bench upon the hill
Between the graveyard and the ditch
You can peg out the domains
of the poor and of the rich:
You can see the towns arteries
You can see the towns veins
But you can't see the towns heart
And you can't explain
How the lives of all the people
Combine and interact
Because the lines in the ground
Are just empty facts
And when you get down on the street
All the order disappears
And the smell of authority
Is the reek of fear
And the fire in the ground
And the fire in the stars
Sends invisible radiation
Through the people and the cars
And it cuts the strands of DNA
Inside the mortal cells
And what edits it is making
Only time and science will tell
And we could torch the naval dockyards
To fix a record of our time
But we're not the greatest villains
Merely amateurs at crime
And the chemist's selling curatives
For STDs and lice
But the medicine is lying
Because life is short and imprecise

You can polish up the tabletop
And repaint all your walls
You can try and clean up every stain
No matter what befalls
But every contact leaves a trace
And living at a modern pace
To build a solid airtight case
The camera eyes are all in place
The fields of view all plotted out
(The blind spots slowly blotted out)
Remember that Old Bill's about
And look before you walk

And I find that I must sing the blues
Because I've got so much to lose
And I don't know when I'll lose it
But I know I surely will
So I scribble petty tragedies
Make mountains of my maladies
And titans of my enemies
And bastards of my friends

"There's scum in the current
And a breach below the waterline
The rivers flowing backwards
And the fish are drowning in the brine
The rains are coming down like a hail of liquid lead
And the black eyed girl takes rubbings
From the headstones of the dead
The ink is clogging up the pen
The paint won't ever dry
The good are lost to entropy
The bad won't ever die
The tide it keeps on coming in
The cliffs are falling down
And the law of the claw
Is the law of the crown
And the lyrics don't mean anything
The music even less
And the statement was signed
In extreme duress
And the streets look sick under sodium light
And David whispers sweetly of the inmost night
And the horror of the empty space is rising like a flood
And I must fill up these walls with spraypaint or with blood"

But I'm not a violent man
Indeed I'm something of a coward
And though quick with my opinion
I am easily overpowered
And I take offence too easily
I've had too much practice
I don't know what is really me
And what the clever act is
I'm not sure what is genuine
And what is for effect
But I'm fairly sure it's true to say
There's nothing I respect
Not the spirit or the letter
Not the graven epitath
Not the image, not the word
Not the monolith or cenotaph
For speaking from black dog depression
(With nature's court in bloody session)
Life holds many savage lessons
And every stone is an expression
Senseless of the senseless deeds
That they cannot remember
Of the wedding in the summer
And the funeral in December
And though the ghosts thus felt aren't literal
They are umbral; They are limnal
And they cannot hear the hymnal
And they cannot see the tears
They are the root of all my fears

The town has walls of concrete
And the town has walls of brick
The town is full of honest folk
The town is full of pricks
And on the bench upon the hill
Between the graveyard and the ditch
I neither know, nor do I care
Which of us is which