allez les blues

• I pushed your head down / Flat onto the page / I held the weapon / Flat against your face / I remembered the promise / That I had made / And turned the pen back / Back onto myself
• So you can stick your words of comfort / And you can take your well wishes too / Singing allez les blues / 'Cause they hold me closer than you would ever do / Allez les blues
• I know your shape and / I know your size / You are the weight of the concrete boots / That pull me under the tide / And now you're marching on to a different drum / Leaving my body here without a beat / A body drained of all feeling / Could be nothing but a piece of meat
• This lump in my throat / Is the knot that you tied / With a flick of your tongue / And a wink of your eye
• You pushed my head down / Flat onto the page / You held the weapon / Flat to my face / You remembered the promise / That you would break / But now the bloodline / Runs through my veins
• 'Cause they hold me closer than you would ever do / Allez les blues

dumb luck

• Baby / Oh, my darling baby / It hurts to see you cry / It'd hurt even more to see you happy / Punished with an ugly face / But yeah, that's really okay, really okay, really though / 'Cause I got dealt an ace / And I'm a blessed guy, 'cause ace is high
• You got it, your dumb luck / I'm cursing your dumb luck
• Sweetheart / Oh, my darling sweetheart / God came to me this morning / Said, "You must repent, your final warning" / Half-hard, half-asleep / Oh, it was no way okay, no way okay, no way / Though I refused to creep / I spat in her eye, sweet world, goodbye
• Dumb luck runs like two-stroke / Through four generations' gene pools / Like your old folks came before you / They, too, never grew a pair of balls / And when the third world war comes / It will not be fought on race / We will line up here in two rows / Betrayers versus betrayed
• The sky is grey, the ground is cold / Perverts gather in the shadows / Others climb up to their rooftops / As they take me to the gallows / I drink myself blind drunk / I recall you in your lost youth / You were half the height a hangman's noose / And twice the alcoholic proof.

she crows

• Writing sleeper hits for all these weeping dipshits / Turning tricks for cheap kicks where I can / I turn 'em with my whole damn body
• She told her friends she'd got with me, she lied it drunkenly / I'm only angry 'cause I wish she had / I wish it with my whole damn body
• Fifty-thousand cotton wool balls / Line your whole bedroom floor / Soaked in black tears from your mascara / Resemble piles of coal / And we'll stack them up high and lie by fireside / To the morning from the night / Led on an ex-boyfriend's corpse, I slit from gullet to balls / And splayed his face to the floor
• She crows / "You want my happiness, but on your terms" / And I know / You're just a foot up out of the doldrums
• All the finger-sucking, singer-fucking girls / Are making me wake up in these cold sweats / I sweat it from my whole damn body
• Swapping drinks tickets for all these indiscreet snippets / Of how it feels to truly be adored / I feel it in my whole damn body
• Blue blood, red carpet burns / In the white of your home counties skin / Daddy's a patriot, enjoyed this summer a lot / But hide your jubilee knees / Me, half-hard from while I dreamt / Pressed in the corner of your bed, recollecting what we did / Taxi cab to Travelodge, he drops me off outside the lobby / Lowers his wink like guillotine
• Invite in for coffee blends and night ends / We get head like Nescafé Gold blend / Big tip for the pretty girl waiting the IHOP / These blank napkins, unwritten suicide notes / It's dark inside these eyelids / Blacker than the ink squid

tiptoe through the true bits

• You asked if you could see me before I went to Spain / You didn't give a reason, didn't know what you would say / But I was hoping that my breath on your face / Would blow every last thing into place / The bedspread decked in suns and moons / And symbols of the star signs / How you read how mine applied to how I would be sex-wise / And in my arms you disappeared and I seemed twice the size / Slept and woke with lips together, sleeping felt like lies
• Girl, I helped you with your demons / But your ghosts are now haunting me too / That French bitch, an ex-boyfriend / Threatening to tie his neck to the roof / But if we tiptoe through the true bits / We might make it to the other side / What doesn't kill you leaves you wounded / But I will nurse you better, alright
• I've been waking on your side of the bed / As the sun's been rising in the West
• If your skin feels softer, I've no argument to make / The weight of such apologies caused stronger men to ache / If his kisses draw the bad out, I can't have a complaint / As they hit your tongue like sedatives while I lay wide awake / You can feel a tremor in a single word / It rattles down your spinal chord

four seasons

• When I come home it will be with / Someone else's blood on my shirt / Another county's dirt on the knees of my ripped jeans / And I won't wanna talk about it
• What you prise from 'tween my fingers / That the devil speaks in Scottish brogue / A love life under two shadows / But you don't wanna talk about it
• The bus stands still, the landscape scrolls right by / (I love you more than ever) / Dual carriageway and landfill line both sides / (I love you more than ever)
• Something verdant, something blooming / Something golden, something dead / Cut into uneven quarters / All four seasons in my head
• And when I lay you down we'll be beneath / (I love you more than ever) / Duck feather duvet, new clean cotton sheets / (I love you more than ever)
• As you bathe the stains from my skin / Only dirt is washed away / 'Cause all the bad lays far more deep / Please, I don't wanna talk about it

to the boneyard

• Respite in twilight, space in the cavity / Wall at grandparent's house behind the apple tree / Where once you sang with your siblings now / Watching bodies bobbing down the stream, leaving the town
• I'm a picture of no flesh, only bones / As we're stripping off my skin to run it up the pole / And salute the breeze that ripples the sheath / Of the skeleton that's trembling on the ground beneath
• Walked your entire country up the central reservation / Take me to the boneyard, baby
• The deadest stare, the slackest hair, the saddest conservation / Take me to the boneyard, baby
• We rifle through piles of bones / For something to chew on, for something to own
• Through my teenage years at my mother's house / Every evening, six times, there comes a phone call to ask / "Where's my daughter gone?" She moved six years ago / Now receiver's cold, the phone calls dry, there's no one home / And that is what we feared the most
• And so we stitched our eyes and mouths closed / Lest we open them / Breaking the seal that our bodies have formed / As a natural defence just to hold back the sorrow / That friends made today will be deaths mourned tomorrow

light leaves, dark sees pt.1

• We need a dog on a leash as a place to start / I need a heart on a lease for you to rip apart / A hand on skin that's so smooth like on blocks of ice / Not saying you're cold, no, baby, it feels just right
• (Light leaves) / My eyes like corks into bottles that overflow / The wine cascades down my neck like a waterfall / I'm like a dog on my knees as I lap you up / You are the beauty and beast, I get all the luck / (Dark sees)
• And when I kiss your chest in the morning / The simple things are the hardest to say / And how the most heartfelt declarations / Can seem like century old cliché / A piece of paper said "Write nice words about me here" / Well, one hundred puppies would not have nothing on you / They got nothing on me
• (Light leaves) / I want you here as naked as a Christmas tree / Left up until the second week of February / It's like my hand in your hair was just meant to be / You are my angel, now come sit atop of me / (Dark sees)
• When light leaves, the dark sees / Just what it's like to feel love, just what it's like to feel loved / When light leaves, the dark sees / Just what it's like