For Mr. Thomas (2000)

Lyrics

[Verse 1] From faded newsprint used to wrap a fish Inscrutably the muse selects your face As I sit drinking namelessly in a nameless bar Five thousand miles and thirty years away [Verse 2] With all the usual ceremonial you were crowned one night King of the field where doctors nail the cows To make of the cock's quill the rights of language And the pricking heart a sword against the hours [Verse 3] Let smirking scholars writhe in their favoured bondage To hold you plaintiff to the charge of art Exhibit A: He falls on legendary lines Singing mother I want a bullet in the heart [Verse 4] The judge in me sucks eggs and jerks the sacred meat For the boy in me still dreams in Milk Wood town Like two provincial bastards playing the galleries I hold your photo to the mirror upside down [Guitar Solo] [Verse 5] As bacon wafts through hungry streets, your ghost pervades Just like an old ex-boxer aged twenty-two Staged up like Falstaff or the wild Welsh Rimbaud You'd laugh to see these monochromes they make of you [Verse 6] Ah, Mr. Thomas, let us ramble through the midnight fair Let us throw old bottles at the ferris wheel Let us paint library on the library, let us raid the moonlight Let us steal away whatever we are supposed to steal [Verse 7] While the border guards check cards with their poker faces Never mind who's winning but the stakes are rare If this jack of thorns they let us hold outbids the joker Let us sneak higher till the frost clings in our hair [Verse 8] Let us watch while the days grow daily more mundane That rough God go striding with his shears Hack wide the bellies of the swollen mountains And rip molten heroes forth to their furious tears