Story Behind The Song

A not very pretty song for a relatively paranoid world

Lyrics

THE STREETS OF THE LIVING


The streets of the living are filled with the haunted
Who wait with baited breath
Shifting eyes like lizards' tongues
They dream of painful death
If I could choose where I would stand
And wait for time to pass
I'd wait where I could watch the street
Behind an armoured glass

Who's going to pay the man
When he stands in the doorway
With a dry kind of laugh
One eye showing Cecil B de Mille
The other the epitomy of night
And who's going to pay the man
When he's swimming the river
With a knife in his teeth
When of all of those millions of lives he could choose
You know he's looking for you

On avenues of diamonds
And paths of beaten gold
The children sell their mothers' blood
It shatters in the cold
They're growing old out on the street
Shivering in the blast
Of another revolution
Behind an armoured glass

And who's going to pay the man
When he leans on the doorpost
Fingering his gun
Your wife is an angel. She comes when he calls
And you find you forget how to think
Who's going to pay the man
When you're less than the dust
On the toe of a sphinx
A fly in the eyeball to the armies of Rome
When the universe goes to war

The love that blows the streets into
An incandescent sky
Is lodged beneath a bed on which
Some foreign lovers lie
I try to touch and taste each day
And make each moment last
And I live in hope of chastity
Behind an armoured glass