I'm the luckiest girl on the upper west side

I've been waiting for you

I'm sleeping/I wake up

There I was in uniform
Looking at the art teacher
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then

He was not that much older than I was
He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum
He asked us what our favorite work of art was,
But never could I tell it was him
Oh, I wish I could tell him --
Oh, I wish I could have told him

I looked at the Rubens and Rembrandts
I liked the John Singer Sargents
He told me he liked Turner
Never have I turned since then
No, never have I turned to any other man

All this having been said,
I married an executive company head
All this having been done, a Turner - I own one
Here I am in this uniformish, pant-suit sort of thing,
Thinking of the art teacher
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then
No, never have I loved any other man

I live on a lonely island in the heart of the city

There isn't any hope for me
I tell you my heart is broken
It's a shame and a pity
I might as well be shipwrecked
In the middle of the sea

There I was, in uniform,

Oh girl, high in your fields above us,
Come and be real for us
Oh you in my arms
Oh yes you were, beautifully charmed

I came to visit an old anchorite

Oh you're so dark and wonderful

Our love can sink a thousand ships;
We toss them on the ocean.
With bitter seas and frozen licks,
We drown them with devotion.

You're super!

The fresh imminence

La mer
Qu'on voit danser le long des golfes clairs
A des reflets d'argent
La mer
Des reflets changeants
Sous la pluie

La mer
Au ciel d'ete confond
Ses blancs moutons
Avec les anges si purs
La mer bergere d'azur
Infinie

Voyez
Pres des etangs
Ces grands roseaux mouilles
Voyez
Ces oiseaux blancs
Et ces maisons rouillees

La mer
Les a berces
Le long des golfes clairs
Et d'une chanson d'amour
La mer
A berce mon coeur pour la vie

You will get a sentimental feeling

Deck the halls with boughs of holly

We were in the mood so we had a little food

This narrative speaks through the entirely colloquial, even banal discourse of misogynistic gender stereotyping, mobilising (male) cultural fantasies that work to regulate women’s bodies by regulating their speech…seeing women…as most dangerous…when they are in speech….Acts of speech…figure carnal activity, so that silences tropes continence and the liberal tongue, the incontinent body of the whore

Star-crossed subjects in love with the king

Her blue eyes swam with vague terror.
She added petishly, 'I can't see why
You're always talking this way...'
'Oh, stop worrying, Nelda,'
Snapped the woman sharply.
She stood up, a thin commanding figure
In faded dungarees.
Businesslike she asked us, 'How many quarts?'
She recorded the total in her notebook,
And we all turned back to picking.

Far from all the subtle noise of the city

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

And Loudon Wainwright married Kate McGarrigle

And I think me and Emmy should get married too
We'll write some songs, and play some gigs, and have some kids
And we'll have little Marthas, and little Rufuses

All forgot for recollecting

Maidens of quality do profess
To rid them of untimely stress
They kiss the boys and make them cry
Put pins and needles in their eyes

Your Mama told you that all I could give you was a reputation

You shut her up and blessed her bones
And killed the cat and broke our home

What I bring back from here will be sweetness itself, white, pink and blue, all enveloped in this magical air

I gave away my daughter, upon a summer’s eve
A travelling man came calling, had something up his sleeve
I sold her for a sixpence, and seven jugs of ale
I sold her for a rabbit’s foot, a tattered piece of sail
I waved farewell from down the lane
She seemed to wave me back
I turned away and felt the pain
And wept for what I lacked

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

I bet you drove those other childs wild

You must have been a beautiful baby
You must have been a wonderful child
When you were only starting to go to kindergarten
I bet you drove those other childs wild

In careers you say you wanna be remembered for your art

Building life-size models of the Velvet Underground from clay,
Hey, you've been abused.

Hello Geoffrey

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots
I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat
for those frequent rainy days
I wanna be your dreamboat
when you want to sail away
Let me be your teddy bear
take me with you anywhere
I don’t care
I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter
I will not run out
I wanna be the electric heater
you’ll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion
hold your hair in deep devotion
Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean
that’s how deep is my devotion

Jenny's got a body just like an hourglass; I want to be the sand inside that hourglass

Freckles on your shoulder
Ammunition like a soldier
I said I'm not gonna take it from you,
I'll let you give it to me
Why aren't we g-g-getting together?

Alabama Arkansas hot and heavy pumpkin pie

'Oh I'm too tired with life to care so much about the little things, Mr Barber, I seem to have quite lost the plot'

The quest for absolute quality

xx

All around the cathedral the saints and apostles look down as she sells her wares

Though her words are simple and few,
Listen, listen, she's calling to you:
"Feed the birds, tuppence a bag,
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag."

The Cabbages are coming now

Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler?

He'll leave his footprints up and down your hall

The women's weepie angle gets to be a bit of a slog later on, but it is all wrapped up as a mesmerically glittering package

"The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find."

You'll have to get up early to be smarter than a whore

Shipmates listen unto me.
I'll tell you in my song
of the things that happened to me
when I come home from Hong Kong.

To me way, Sandy, my dear Annie.
Oh, you New York girls, can't you dance the polka?

As I walked down to Chatham Street, a fair maid I did meet.
She asked me, please, to see her home. She lived on Bleecker Street.
Now, if you'll only come with me, you can have a treat.
You can have a glass of brandy and something nice to eat.

Before we sat down to eat, we had sev'ral drinks.
The liquor was so awful strong, I quickly fell asleep.

When I awoke next mornin’, I had an achin' head.
My gold watch and my pocketbook and the lady friend had fled.
Now looking ‘round this little room, nothin’ could I see
but a woman’s shoes, an apron, which now belonged to me.

Now dressed in the lady's apron, I wandered most forlorn
'Till Martin Churchill took me in and he sent me round Cape Horn.

So sailor lads, take warning, when you land on that New York shore,
You'll have to get up early to be smarter than a whore

Le coup de la semelle Michelin

I promise nothing: friends will part;
All things may end, for all began;
And truth and singleness of heart
Are mortal even as is man.

But this unlucky love should last
When answered passions thin to air;
Eternal fate so deep has cast
Its sure foundation of despair.

I want to fill my lungs with the radiance of the soul

I suppose that Francesca Brightman and William Oakwood were always going to marry each other rather than anybody else, but the event took us all rather by surprise. It had been tacitly agreed for years that some sort of understanding would have to come about between the two great clans of Brightman and Oakwood, but nobody had yet seen fit to put a plan together for action. Francesca, a brilliantly pretty girl of nineteen, and Oakwood, twenty-three and solidly-handsome in that way which smoothly suggests both breeding and money, were really among the best-looking and most eligible young people in London at that time. However, when Oakwood emerged from her father’s study, looking rather pleased with himself and with a cheque in his pocket, itwas quite a shock. Nobody had even known that they had any attachment to each other, spare the usual ballroom pleasantries, and yet her she was, going out onto the scene bearing a diamond ring and that flushed expression peculiar to the newly-engaged.

Where bright lights and angels meet

Take me wandering through these streets

I can barely look at you, don't tell me who you lost it to

Her mind's made up; she don't wanna go steady.
She's only seventeen, so she's probably not ready.
A.M.A.N.D.A. Norgaard
Saw you on the camera at Cross Bay Boulevard.

Weep for the sinners and cry for the folk, the heart with no blood and the egg with no yolk

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

I want you to understand that I've tried so hard to be a man

A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munched, and munched, and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o' th' Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

The date I scheduled for my death was 1962, and that is coming ominously near

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

She is of the ground, of the dark, of the night, she is furrowed and sour and wiry

She was always like this. Always meek and mild, little child.
We used to sit cross legged on the floor and talk about Chekov. She dyed her
hair and grew it, and we went out in the rain in Kansas,
and she laid down on the great white horse with its dirty wet mane
and her eyes ran down her cheeks, oil slicks in the Pacific.
She put on a tattered feather headdress and stood
on the plain as a defiant Pocahontas. She sat on my kitchen counter
in my old shirt and my running shoes and chain smoked and dyed
the ceiling jaundice-yellow. There’s still a patch of golden staining
above the place. We got thrown out of the
motel in Wisconsin and ended up sleeping with beggars
in a ditch.

We are wicked men, looking for a buckle to loosen

I lost who I was in the dust of a downtown romeo
In a couple of weeks you can tell all the freaks
That you can bring my body home

I never knew a sweetheart spend her money on a chap

I will go where I am wanted, where there's room for one or two,
And the men are none too many for the work there is to do

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away, you'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen

Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain’t right.
I’m so scared in case I'll fall off my chair,
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

Didn't think there could be much more, then in walked Rodrick Usher with the Lady Eleanor

My mother achieved her life-goal at nineteen. She was July 1924’s Country Life girl, fetchingly reclining on a mantelpiece in a scarlet ball gown, a fat spaniel at her ankle and a fat ring on her finger. A smug little piece below announced her engagement to an Honourable. I followed ten and a half months later. It was, she always said, a great disappointment that I was female. Father refused to speak to her for weeks. I lived with nanny at the London house until I was seven, by which point two sons had appeared and I was duly packed off to a boarding school on the south coast. I was at Malone House for eight years, then two in Switzerland. My brothers went to Eton, and I hardly saw them. Nevertheless, I was not unhappy. The mistresses were generally good fun, not particularly concerned with education, and really only a few years older than ourselves. One especially thrilling lady, Miss Toole, even lent us her illicit copy of Lady Chatterley, and recounted tales of marvellously exotic love affairs with members of the civil service. We were all quite in love with her.

Shovel-faces like pennies down the back of the mind

For this ignorance of me
Seems a kind of innocence.
Fast enough I shall wound it:
Let me breathe till then
Its milk-aired Eden,
Till my own life impound it-
Slow-falling; grey-veil-hung; a theft,
A style of dying only.

Today the Roman and his trouble are ashes under Uricon

If truth in hearts that perish
Could move the powers on high,
I think the love I bear you
Should make you not to die.

Sure, sure, if stedfast meaning,
If single thought could save,
The world might end to-morrow,
You should not see the grave.

This long and sure-set liking,
This boundless will to please,
-- Oh, you should live for ever,
If there were help in these.

But now, since all is idle,
To this lost heart be kind,
Ere to a town you journey
Where friends are ill to find.

What a world my parents gave me

You lied about fighting with a knife, it's a rip off
Choosing all the slain and bleeding in the rain, it's a rip off
Rocking in the nude and feeling such a dude, it's a rip off
Dancing in the dark with a trans in the park, it's a rip off
See your baby's stud slipping in the mud, it's a rip off
Bleached on the beach trying to tickle your peach, it's a rip off
See the girl dance in her man-skin pants, it's a rip off
Terraplane Tommy wants to bang your gong, it's a rip off
Gypsy girl's good people treat her like a fool, she's a rip-off
The President's weird, he's got burgundy beard, such a rip-off
I'm the King of the highway
I'm the Queen of the hop
You should see me
At the Governor's ball
Doing the rip-off bop
I'm a social person
I'm the creature in disguise
There's a man with a whip
On his silver lip
Living inside my eyes
I'm the cat from the alley
I'm the fleetfoot voodoo man
There's very little that's ever said
All of which I understand
Caught like skunk, in space and time, it's a rip-off
If it's hers, well it must be mine
It's a rip-off
Such a rip-off

In my mind I can't study war

"You're overwrought, madam. I've opened a window for you. A little air will do you good. Why don't you go? Why don't you leave Manderley? He doesn't need you. He's got his memories. He doesn't love you, he wants to be alone again with her. You've nothing to stay for. You've nothing to live for really, have you? Look down there. It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you? Why don't you? Go on. Go on. Don't be afraid!"

When I was a Freeport and you were the main drag

Oh never fear, man, nought's to dread,
Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There's nothing but the night.

Now dreary dawns the eastern light, and fall of eve is drear, and cold the poor man lies at night, and so goes out the year

Little is the luck I've had,
And oh, 'tis comfort small
To think that many another lad
Has had no luck at all.

My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two

Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.

Yonder see the morning blink, the sun is up

Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There's nothing much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.

The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do

Home is the sailor, home from sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.

Maybe we should call her to see if she's ok

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights
In armour coming,
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and
Drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing
To the sun
That was floating on the breeze.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.

Choked to death on a vitamin tablet

I will go where I am wanted, to a lady born and bred
Who will dress me free for nothing in a uniform of red;
She will not be sick to see me if I only keep it clean:
I will go where I am wanted for a soldier of the Queen.

I will go where I am wanted, for the sergeant does not mind;
He may be sick to see me but he treats me very kind:
He gives me beer and breakfast and a ribbon for my cap,
And I never knew a sweetheart spend her money on a chap.

I will go where I am wanted, where there's room for one or two,
And the men are none too many for the work there is to do;
Where the standing line wears thinner and the dropping dead lie thick;
And the enemies of England they shall see me and be sick.

I met her in a club down in old Soho where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola

In a dark brown voice she said 'Lola'

You will never feel quite clean in this new skin

And oh, so many die
Torn apart at the hands of a child
I'll keep on going, I've got nothing to lose
I gave up morals when I took up you.
And it's boring to hear of another young truth
What a typically shit thing to do

The cabbages are coming now; the earth exhales

The Captain's got his boots on and he’s heading out the door,
Leaving his lady alone thinking -

‘He don’t love me no more
He’s done with all this bullshit, he’s going back to war,
If Heaven is as Heaven does then this is Hell for sure
And He’ll tick tick tick tick tick tick tick away'

Blood runs thicker you know

Please don't get me wrong you see I forgive you with a song we call the Likely Lads

Be sure to read this before you die

Pray for me.

A child is sleeping within your soul

Naturally.

No, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:--
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

Who are these people? They are too stupid to be your real parents

Well, there was a woman from Samaria
Came to the well to get some water
There she met a stranger who did a story tell
That woman dropped her pitcher
She drank and was made richer
From the water he gave her and it was not in the well