The Take Off and Landing of Everything
Album Lyrics
This Blue World
This blue world and her countless sisters
And all that came before that day
Our atoms straining to align
Was the universe in rehearsal for us
When all the world is sucking on its sleeve
You'll hear an urgent morse in the gentle rain
And if you plot your course on the window pane
You'll see the coldest star in the arms of the oldest tree
And you'll know to come to me
In the back of a broken car
When the blizzard blossom flew
Reading aloud with our fingers
What we both already knew
And the blizzard blossom flew
A sober midnight wish
Flies over the roofs and down through the years
Would that you and yours are sleeping
Safe and warm in size formation
While three chambers of my heart beat true and strong with love for another
The fourth is yours forever
Charge
I am electric
With a bottle in me
Got a bottle in me
And glory be these fuckers are ignoring me
I’m from another century
I am a preacher
When I’ve got it on me
And I’ve got it on me
And glory be these fuckers are ignoring me
We never learn from history
Hey
I am the beau who loved her so in every song
And I designed that little mystery on your tongue
I’ve broken jaws protecting laws to keep you free
I made your day so take a seat by me
I am an old tree
Gonna talk my jaw free
Someone come and get me
Another night beside myself would finish me
Give us G & T and sympathy
I am the diehard with an empty dance card propping up a young bar
I’m pouring oil in double time upon the troubled rising tide inside of me
Upon my history
Fly Boy Blue / Lunette
It's a lethal ballet
Air traffic congestion
I'm having a baby
Second thoughts
Scotch
Dinner and
Someone’s dancing on the box
A former MP and no one’s watching
My oldest friends are a serious habit
Fly boy blue
So bring your faces
Home to my sweet trampoline
And acres of crash site love
Presidential delays
Suppose I’m just lucky
l'm having a shindig
Me, Red Bob and The Ivory Host
And someone’s shouting on the box
A chinless prefect gone Godzilla
My newest friends have forgotten my name
But so have I so far so good and home
You and me trampoline
And oceans of crash site love
Lunette
What can be said of the cigarettes smoked
A prop for a joke or a mark on the clock
If I stopped would the bus ever come
Would the dawn ever kiss me forgivingly knowing what’s done
Would the drivel make scribble, make sense and then song
Would the woodbines denied black another man’s lungs
Perverse as it may sound I sometimes believe
The tip to my lips just reminds me to breathe
What can be said of the whiskey and wine
Random abandon or ballast for joy
That was scuppered with trust
Little more than a boy
And besides I’m in excellent company
I’m reaching the age when decisions are made on the life and the liver
And I'm sure, last ditch that I'll ask for more time
But Mother forgive me
I still want a bottle of good Irish whiskey
And a bundle of smokes in my grave
But there isn’t words yet for the comfort I get
From the gentle lunette at the top of the nape of the neck that I wake to
And where are the words for the leap in my chest
When mischief appears either side of the scar on your nose
Made by a rose thorn
So you claim
By a rose thorn
New York Morning
The first to put a simple truth in words
Binds the world in a feeling all familiar
‘Cause everybody owns the great ideas
And it feels like there’s a big one round the corner
Antenna up and out into New York
Somewhere in all that talk is all the answers
And oh my giddy aunt New York can talk
It’s the modern Rome and folk are nice to Yoko
Every bone of rivet steel
Each corner stone and angle
Jenga jut and rusted water tower
Pillar, post and sign
Every painted line and battered ladder building in this town
Sings a life of proud endeavour and the best that man can be
Me I see a city and I hear a million voices
Planning, drilling, welding, carrying their fingers to the nub
Reaching down into the ground
Stretching up into the sky
Why?
Because they can
They did and do
So you and I could live together
Oh my God New York can talk
Somewhere in all that talk is all the answers
Everybody owns the great ideas
And it feels like there’s a big one round the corner
The desire in the patchwork symphony
The desire like a distant storm
For love
Did it come from me
‘Cause it feels like there’s a big one round the corner
The way the day begins
Decides the shade of everything
But the way it ends depends on if you're home
For every soul a pillow and a window please
In the modern Rome where folk are nice to Yoko
Real Life (Angel)
If you wake in the quake and the roll of the heartbroken
Pounding the ground in a sawn off ballet
Bring us in an indigo dawn with the lovelorn and renegade
You always found peace in the grip of a beat darling
Time alone with the pounding of your heart
As it starts to heal you'll find a better mirror in another
You I’ve never known dumbfounded
So out of reach and hollowed through
Blue and white the light and sound surrounding
As the music pulls you through
And on that hallelujah morning
In the arms of new love
The peace that you’ll feel’s
Real life
Go straight to the place where you first lost your balance
And find your feet with the people that you love and
Bring us in an indigo dawn with the lovelorn and renegade
You with the eyes ever met not forgotten
Get hold of the night that rises in your blood
Focus on your pulse
Focus on your breath
Know that we're never far away
Angel
You with the eyes ever met not forgotten
You with the arms for the lonely whoever
You with the laugh that could bring down a tenement
Talking your way to the heart of the citadel
Up on the tables or shouldering strangers
Or under my arm as we add to the waterfall
My little sister with brothers in common
You never need fear a thing in this world
While I have a breath in me blood in my veins
You never need fear a thing in this world
While I have a breath in me blood in my veins
You never need fear a thing in this blue world
Honey Sun
I live and die by the hot and cold in strangers’ eyes
But danger lies behind the tape across my door
I know a place where angels lace the lemonade
And I cannot stay where all the broken plans were made
Broken devotion
Can I jump in the gun
And fly
Over the ocean
Can I jump in the gun
And string up a net across Lafayette
And sing of my deeds while I’m gone
And I'll spin some lies to tell you upon
My return from the ends of the earth
She and I would death defy and promenade
She and I were profligate as de rigueur
She and I were for a Burton Taylor made
She and I won't find another me and her
My sunflower
My ringpip
Oh love like a sundown harbour
Oh love like a falling bomb
Oh my love
Give her wings and armour
Oh my love
Gotta be long gone
My Sad Captains
I'm running out of miracles
The streets alive with one-man shows
The corner boys were moved along
We're plummeting like crippled crows
Oh my soul
Oh long before you and I were born
Others beat these benches with their empty cups
To the night and its stars
To be here and now and who we are
Another sunrise with my sad captains
With who I choose to lose my mind
And if it’s so we only pass this way but once
What a perfect waste of time
The BMX apothecary
The architect of infamy
For each and every train we missed
A bitter little Eucharist
Oh my soul
To the here and now and who we are
Colour Fields
All clear
Good Lord
Did well to be ignored
Your falling temperature
Like cooling kisses
All through your head
A made-up water’s edge
A summer gone on tabling fabled blisses
I’d love to see you waving
From the far side of the swim
Gathered in by a waiting troop of the open- hearted
Where colour field meets canvas
And the picture breathes you in
Where all the stories meant for you have already started
Bright girl, dead town
Walking tall but blown around
The secret chainmail gown of your father’s blessing
Bright girl, dead town
Open mouths for miles around
I still see you keeping those dough boys guessing
The Take Off and Landing of Everything
You have the time-worn shimmer of tarantella on a Tuscan plain
Patiently listen as dull reminiscences fall from my jaws in a jumble again
You hold a lamp to my slumber
I resurface just to do a new number on you
You kiss the wrist of the hand that has twisted itself all into your hair
You close the blinds and doors behind me and clear all obstacles on the stair
You are an open book
I’m on the bathroom floor
Yours is an open door
I’m throwing ballast overboard
You are a genius teetering
Hurricane wild be calm as the deep
Every living thing needs watering
I miss loving you
Actually loving you
Words on my bedroom wall
Speak of my stone cold care
A prayer to the take off and landing of everything
Leaving your lips as we took to the sky
And a prayer to the take off and landing of everything
I’ll say for you and I will for all time
Wrote on my bedroom wall
Spoke of your deep true care
Over my shoulder and just as I leave
I see you slipping the world up your sleeve
Well take it and run
Go on
That’s why it’s there
In a prayer to the take off and landing of everything good
The Blanket of Night
Paper cup of a boat
Heaving chest of the sea
Carry both of us
Carry her
Carry me
From the place we were born
To the land of the free
Carry both of us
Carry her
Carry me
The ocean
That bares us from our home
Could save us
Or take us for its own
The danger
That life should lead us here
My angel
Could I have steered us clear
Gone the light from her eyes
With the lives that we made
Just the two of us
In the night
On the waves
Moving silent her lips
By the moon’s only light
Sewing silver prayers
In the blanket of night
Paper cup of a boat
Heaving chest of the sea
Carry both of us or
Swallow her
Swallow me