SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter) Songtext
von Scott Walker

This is my job
I don't come around and put out your red light
When you work

What's the matter?
Didn't you get enough attention at home?

If shit were music
La da da, la da da
You'd be a brass band

Know what?
You should get an agent, oh yeah, yeah
Why sit in the dark handling yourself?

For Lavinia
Who goes like gynozoon
IX, I, V, IX, III, V, I

For the citizen
Whose joke lays in their hand
I, V, I, V, IX, IX, III


To play fugues
On Jove's Spam castanets
V, IX, IX, I, VI, IX, I

Cattle are slaughtered
Entrails examined
Spread out across the moon

The Tisza is rising
Topless bars overflowing
Pulsing through the flumes

Drop-kicked coloraturas
Fouling my ears
Bypassing an anorexic sky and

Scar jumping grafters
Chorion-crying
How can you stoop so high?

For Papiria
Who plops the Pantheon
IV, VI, IX, V, I, IX, I

For grosse Gauls
Who won't leave our sheep alone
V, I, VII, IX, I, IX, I


Norsemen do not eat the big pink mint
Flush hard
It's a long way to Athens

Gone from your wooden palace
The wild mice pelt clothes slipped from my toes
Where termites scribble the walls

Twisted forth and gone, "Little father"
The 'snip' off your nine-ninety-nine
Ffrom where you groomed yourself too small

No more dragging this wormy anus
'Round on shag piles from Persia to Thrace
I've severed my reeking gonads
Fed them to your shrunken face

Janus head
It's said will give good door
IX, IX, V, IX, I, IX, I

For a Roman
Who's proof that Greeks fucked bears
V, V, IX, VII, V, IV, I

Heard this one?
This'll kill ya
About the ropes of hair
Care of Venus the Bald
Tugging Mercs across the plain

Those measuring road-rashed bellies
A perte de vue to me night and day

The one about the saint
Sstranded high upon his pillar
Thirty summers, thirty winters
His constant visitor, his mother

But he'd stare into the distance
Ignored her calls from down below

"Did you ever throw your own mother's food back at her?"
"Did you ever tell her, 'Take this junk away.'?"
"What kind of unnatural son would do that to his own mother?"

The tasteless one about the bantam
Who couldn't climb a rung

Your Helipolis is scrapheap
Gone, the brown slug of your tongue

For eunuch Ron
Who sleeps at night across the emperor's bedroom door
III, V, IX, IX, I, V, I

Grostulating-Gorbi
Requires fresh packing
II, IX, V, I, IV, IX, I

Over, it's over
Syrinx screaming all around
Bar, bar, bar
Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar

Aquil-Aetos, aquil-aetos
Screaming all around
Filling up my life
Screaming all around

Bar, bar, bar
Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar

Over, it's over
Your Nibelung can't be found
Their shadowless shadows wiping me
Wiping me clean away

Bar, bar, bar
Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar

Where's the scent of pine torches
The lumbering caravans
The felt covered wagons, moving like galleons?

The 'wedgie', the 'melvy' to threaten the air?
Only fledge muffled long hollow bone-drums a-beating
The dark day behind us, the dark day ahead
The wind drone across skull goblets
Then Basel-cum-Strasbourg-cum-Frankfurt-cum-Speyer-cum

I hear the only place you're ever invited is outside

If brains were rain
You'd surely be a desert

Look, don't go to a mind reader
Go to a palmist
I know you've got a palm

Does your face hurt?
'Cause it's killing me

Cut to lost Lumbago City
I am perched against the sky
A banner shoal of sparrows
Sways in the twilight

Down there, as ish kabibbles
Schlepp the shade forever
Earth's hoary fontenelle
Weeps softly for a thumb thrust

A of threadbare black-stockinged legs
Is fanning out into a frazzled black rose
No phalanxes fleeing like zippers of blood
Red plumes nodding between the horses' ears

Hey buddy, give it up
Hey pal, come down, join the living
Wanted: A lisping, hobbling, noseless runt
Phone: IX-IX-IX-IX-IX-IX-I

"Someday you'll go far if you catch the right train."
How about
"You're so fat
When you wear a yellow raincoat, people scream, 'Taxi!'."

Then there's:
"You're so boring, you can't even evertain doubt."

I'll grease this pole behind me
Grease this pole behind me
Grease this pole
Grease this pole

There's an unfinished rumour doing the rounds
It seems the storks are seen returning to the rooftops
Carrying back their children
Clacking like dried palms

Loud enough to be heard from Reims to Orleans
River banks are cleared, bridges retaken
Oblivion, driven from the city street by street

So why have screams of laughter
The pissing stench of mares-milk beer
Come to bait your toad down from his toadstool?

And if I'm melancholic
And if I shed a tear

Don't forget to blink
Lest your eyeballs dry up
Fall out of their sockets
And dangle on your cheeks like Caesar's shrivelled coglione

It's when I hear a sawed-off coffin
Rolls beneath the Tisza

Hey bar
Ah, my noblest music
Hey bar, bar, bar, bar...

I'll grease this pole behind me
Grease this pole behind me
Grease this pole
Grease this pole

Over, it's over
But where's the electrons
Squeezing all around?
Burning up my life
Squeezing all around

Over, it's over
Only freezing all around

I greased that pole behind me
Greased that pole behind me
Your Nibelung can't be found

I've looked high and low for you
I guess I didn't look low enough

Don't move
I want to forget you just the way you are
I really hope your face clears up
You know, I think you've got nothing there

Infrared, infrared
I could drop into the darkness
It's so cold, infrared
What if I freeze and drop into the darkness?