Lyrics:

from:DANH@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL (Rami Zakh)

SIREN SONG (Van Der Graaf Generator)
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Letters in pencil
some of them as heavy as lead
as dated as carbon
as black as coal
but burning as red

Clues faintly stenciled
the message,though bleached,is on red
as secret as marble
as young
as old
as living
as dead

And always that laugh
that comes as though it's from pain,
though i'm lashed to the mast
still it hammers round my brain
laughter in the backbone,
laughter impossibly wise,that same
laughter that comes every time i flash on that look in your eyes
which whispers of a black zone
which'll mock all my credos as lies
where all logic is done
and time will smash every theory i devise
and the hour-glass is shattered
only by the magic of your touch
and where nothing really matters,
no,nothing matters very much.

So the siren song runs through the ages,
and it courses through my veins like champagne
and with all the sweet kisses of addiction
it's calling me to break my bones again

Future memory exploding like shrapnel,
some splinters escape on my tongue
some of them scar comprehension,
beneath the scab they burn -
but the wound becomes num...

And always the song draws me forward
rejoicing in the surge and the prayer
bored with all but the mad
the strange
the freak
the impossible dare

...Still your laugh chills my marrow 'till i embraceth on my knees
oh,when the mast becomes a flagpole,what becomes of me...?

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One can not fully grasp the work Peter Hammill has done throughout
the years without having the possibility,apart from listening to it,
to READ it -
this is a first compilation of PH lyrics in the archives,and i hope that
everyone capable of broadening it will do so -

'What's the good of songs,anyway,they're just exercises in solitude...'

Bye,Ram.