Verse 1-

And in my heart does my love caress

A picture of my soul, that always lived with it;

And in its memory reads and re-reads

“Living On”, always their favourite lyric

What will show our son poor is if he comes back with a suntan

Having never landed on sand Mediterranean

Sixteen divided by two rooms, our family, would-be global

Worth our weight tax free in total, uncontractedly mobile

Our new father of country’s deeply suspicious of he, of

A very deep and dirty root of his own money tree

But if they crib second-hand sensation from our love’s perfumery

To separate us he’d have to see whеre the split twixt us’s between

Split, yеah, from much of the self I knew, in no true marriage:

Resilience is the inheritance I swim in, fear my favourite carriage

Where most of me sank, what was left of me came alive

A vomited son, like the one eaten by every horizon

Chorus

Heave, ho on the sickening tide

Heave, ho on the sickening tide

Grin back to the horizon’s smiling

At the leftovers it has spit up the ocean wide

Verse 2-

“In the East I was a man

In the West I am but a crop

At home I led a theatre of ops by blood mopped

At new home, my soul just front and stock of shop

Uncle in the spare room, grandmother stairs up

Souls once clustered together for the warmth of tear’d luck

Now drift through a sea without planetary course

Unbought til by the gravity of the event horizon

I remember a laugh on deck, a kid pinched his friend’s hand

A laugh, yes, I last laughed ‘fore we made land

A laugh delayed in contract til we build paradise to a man

That which no eye can see, though retrospect’s lens can;

That failure of evolution, a heart designed to leap

At what its host cannot peep; it’s nature constitution, writ by air

Now that I know I cannot set in the pub that is their day’s end

For the first time I pray not Godways then

But to my fellow man for mercy;

Is to do so to follow religion as God intended?”

Verse 3-

To my mother and father, newly-in-law

"That new house I spoke of, we return there, and

It is new down to a paint fleck’s hair, every day

I return, unlike home, with no blood or oil on me

Nothing from that vein that with my nation might bond me

You know the premier here is a childless man?

How can he give us reaping if his heart’s such barren land?

My love, your daughter, is sold; I’m unbought, yet both of us

Long to cultivate our love on that reservation

By the bared soles revealed here we walk upon

I wedged my soul into the fusebox of a light switch to keep it on

I hesitate to choose the parallel life; unafraid though shy of combination

But it’s the pub again tonight; they learned some Shadu in preparation

Everything I know I know by hearing

And here, in this place, I can hear nothing anymore;

I hear the quiet, its dejection of sound that would ply it

I await til fate takes that quiet and into tumult flies it."