Roger's in the archive looking up Casement
Martha's in the government digging up the basement
rebel into representative for the voter
shadow backbencher couldn 't get a word in
turned up anyway   issues burning
all consuming   drinks in the cabinet
spent a lot of time just examining the building
drinks on the house? you must be joking
corridors of power cuts toy telephone bills
long time no see underneath the floorboard
looking for the roots of the family treetops
toe's in the water but you've only got ten

Fingers in the eel pie poke around tip top
tunnelling a wormhole Eartha Kitty catfish
meadow brown peacock   pupa-larva-caterpillar
hibernate in winter of our discotheque no
end in sight   more like a spiral coil
or curler   just unwinding   very slowly
revealing endless disappearing pipelines
genuflecting bowing deeply   it
don't take a weatbergirl to see where
the wind is blowing   what the wind is bending

Isobars are opening   sex to midnight
cabinet shuffling homeward bound   taking
a detour   rendezvous do   chapel in the valley
of the blown up doll   that's not Martha
shunting in a siding   she got homework
up to here
Roger's in the footnotes up to his elbones
verse and chapter disinterred
borrowing a bookcase don't come easy
the weight of the evidence in parenthesis
beggars tightly furled belief

Heads on blockabeater repetition on the line
Shell shock supertroopers   whirl banking oil palm
intercontinental drift   over the rainbow
over the sea to ska rocker skintone
hirsuit missed a link and that's not all
that he got missing inna thousand years of
orthotoxic waste disposal   god proposal
jealous sky   whatever is a girl to do
to break the service in its tried and tested
and found wanting state of oh! boy network
stewardship?

Little Johnny Aardvark never hurt
nobody Martha friend and Roger too
tone down a little   sotto voce   some tall order
given that four minutes seems eternity time
in the hushed up world of waspish Vsigns
A-sides sui-C-side salads of the bad young B-sides
what's the point of digging deeper just to lay
the ghost of Sala Hal-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub?

"Don't give up" the deadman cried
"there's more of us than there are of you
soon you'll all be on our side   forever more or
Lester Young died   'Fat Girl' also blowing all the blues
away side   dust ain't just dust   trust us like we
live forever   broken loose from greystone tether
keep on tiptoe through the archive   we are dead
but you are alive   Martha yes and Roger too
until you let the gringos grind you down"