MARILLION:   Fugazi

Assassing

I am the assassin with tongue forged from eloquence
I am the assassin providing your nemesis.

On the sacrificial altar to success
Unleash a stranger from a kiss
No incantations of remorse
Unsheath the blade within the voice
my friend
my friend
my friend
my friend

Who decorates the scarf with the fugi knot
Who camouflaged emotion in the thousand yard stare,
Who gouged the notches in the family tree
Who hypnotised the guilt in career rhythm trance.

Listen as the syllables of slaughter cut with calm precision
Patterned frosty phrases rape your ears and sow the ice incision
Apocalyptic alphabet casting spell, the creed of tempered diction
Adjectives of annihilation bury the point beyond redemption
Venomous verbs of ruthless candour plagiarise assassins fervour
A friend in need is a friend that bleeds,
Let bitter silence infect the wound.

You were a sentimental mercenary in a free fire zone,
Parading a Hollywood conscience,
You were a fashionable objector with a uniform fetish,
      Pavlovian slaver at the cash till ring of success.
A non com observer - I assassin the collector - defector.

So you resigned yourself to failure
And I emerged the chilling stranger
To eradicate the problem
Unsheathed the blade within the voice
my friend
my friend
my friend
my friend
I am the assasin
I am the assasin.

Punch & Judy

Washing machine, pinstripe dream stripped the gloss from a beauty queen.
Found our nest, in the Daily Express, met the Vicar in a holy vest.
Brought up the children Church of E, now I vegetate with a color TV.
Worst ever thing that happened to me, oh for divorce.

Whatever happened to pillow fights, friday nights and jeans so tight?
lover's lane, passion games, sunday walks in the pouring rain.

Curling tongs, mogadons, "I got a headache baby don't take so long"
Middle age dread, single beds, losing the war in the waistlands spread

Who left the cap off the toothpaste tube, who forgot to flush the loo,
Leave your sweaty socks outside the door,
Don't walk across my polished floor,
Leave your sweaty socks outside the door.

Whatever happened to morning smiles, wicked wiles, permissive styles,
twinkling eyes, hard fast drives, compliments on unnatural size

Propping up a bar, family car, sweating out a mortgage as a balding clerk,
World War Three, suburbanshee, just slip her these pills and I'll be free.

Jigsaw

We are jigsaw pieces aligned on the perimeter edge,
interlocked through a missing piece.
We are Renaissance children becalmed beneath the bridge of sighs,
Forever throwing firebrands at the stonework,
We are Siamese children related by the heart,
Bleeding from the surgery of initial confrontation,
Holding the word scalpels on trembling lips

Chorus: Drowning Tequila sunsets, stowaways on midnight ships,
Refugees of romance plead asylum from the real,
scrambling distress signals on random frequencies,
forever repatriated on guilt laden morning planes,
We are pilots of passion sweating the flight on course,
to another summit conference another breakfast time divorce,
screaming out a ceasefire, snowblind in an avalanche zone

Chorus

Are we trigger happy, happy, happy? Russian roulette in the waiting room,
Empty chambers embracing the end,
Puzzled visions haunt the ripples of a trevi moon,
Dream coins for the fountain or to cover your eyes.
We reached ignition point from the sparks of pleasantries,
sensed the smoke advancing from horizons,
You must have known I was planning an escape

Chorus

Emerald Lies

To be the prince of possession in the gallery of contempt
Suffering your indiscreet discretions and you ask me to relent
As you accumulate flirtations with the calculated calmness of the whore.
I am the harlequin with diamonded costume dripping shades of green,
I am the harlequin    sense strangers violate my sanctuary, prowl my dreams.
Plundering your diaries steal your thoughts    innocence
Ravaging your letters, unearth your plots   innocence.

To don the robes of Torquemada to resurrect the Inquisition
And in that tortured subtle manner inflict questions within questions,
Looking in shades of green through shades of blue,
I trust you trust in me to mistrust you.

Through the Silk Cut haze to the smeared mascara
A 40 watt sun on a courtroom drama.

And the coffee stains gather till the pale kimono,
Set the wedding rings dancing on the cold linoleum

And accusations moths that circle on the light
Char their wings and spiral senseless suicidal flight
Pack our world within a suitcase, hot tears melt this icy palace and
    dissolve a crystal swallowed by the night
Looking in shades of green through shades of blue,
Looking in shades of green through shades of blue.

She Chameleon

Sheltering her ego on the edge of the floodlights arc,
She'll contemplate seduction, calculate the catch.
When she moved her presence speared me
When she spoke her words ensnared me
Watch the lizard
watch the lizard
Watch the lizard with the crimson veil.

She crucified my heart in the depths of a satin grave,
As I lay in sweating monologue I sensed the lovelight fade,
Within the spiral of the cigarette,
You betrayed your bedside etiquette,
I saw the lizard
I saw the lizard
I touched the lizard with the crimson veil.

I've seen a different doorway shut a million times before,
Smiling she chameleons, smiling vinyl whores.

They know what they want, they sing your name and glide between the sheets,
I never say no, in the chemical glow we'll let our bodies meet.
So was it just a fuck, was it just a fuck, just another fuck I said,
Loving just for laughs, carnal autograph, lying on a lizard's bed.
So was it just a fuck, was it just a fuck, just another fuck I bled,
Degraded and alone, raped and still forlorn, betrayed
     upon a lizard's bed.
We chameleon, we chameleon, we (oui!)

Incubus

When footlights dim in reverence to prescient passion
Forewarned my audience leaves the stage, floating ahead
perfumed shift, within the stammering silence, the face
that launched a thousand frames, betrayed by a porcelain
tear, a stained career.

You've played this scene before, you've played this scene before.
I the mote in your eye, I the mote in your eye, a misplaced reaction.

Darkroom unleashes imagination in pornographic images in
which you will always be the star, utouchable, unapproachable,
Constant in the darkness, nursing an erection, a misplaced
reaction, with no flower to place before this gravestone,
And the walls become enticingly newspaper thin, but that
would only be developing the negative view, and you have to be
exposed in voyeuristic color, the public act, let you model
your shame on the mannequin catwalk, catwalk, let the cats walk.

I've played this scene before, I've played this scene before,
I the mote in your eye, I the mote in your eye, a misplaced reaction,
satisfaction.

A debilitating speck of doubt that came from absolutely nowhere.

You can't brush me under the carpet, you can't hide me under
the stairs, the custodian of your private fears, your leading
actor of yesteryear, who as you crawled out of the alleys of
obscurity, sentenced to rejection in the morass of anonymity.
You who I directed with a lovers will, you who I let hypnotise
the lens. You who I let bathe in the spotlights glare, you who
wiped me from your memory like a greasepaint mask, just like
a greasepaint mask.

But now I'm the snake in the grass, the ghost of film reels past,
the producer of your nightmare and the performance has just begun,
begun, it's just begun

Your perimeter of courtiers jerk like celluloid puppets,
as you stutter, paralysed, with rabbit's eyes. Searing the shadows,
flooding the wings, to pluck elusive salvation from the
understudy's lips, retrieve the soliloquy, maintain the
obituary, my cue line in the last act and you'll wait in
silent solitude waiting for the prompt, waiting for the
prompt, waiting for the prompt, you've played this scene before.

Fugazi

Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a Blackheath cell,
Extinguishing the fires in my private hell,
provoking the heartache to renew the license
of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule
Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience
Wrappped in the christening shard of a hangover,
baptised in tears from the real

Drowning in the liquid seize on the Picadilly line, rat race,
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth.
(Caress Ophelia's hand with breaststroke ambition,
the albatross courtship marrytime tradition.)
Sheathed with the Walkman wear the halo of distortion,
aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation.
(But she turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart
and crucified herself around my neck)
From the Time-Life-Guardians in their conscience bubbles,
safe and dry in my sea of troubles,
nine to fives, with suitable ties,
While I'm cast adrift as their sideshow, peepshow, stereo hero,
Becalm, bestill, bewitch, drowning, drowning in the real

The thief of Baghdad hides in Islington now,
Praying deportation for his sacred cow,
A legacy of romance from a twilight world
The dowry of a relative mystery girl
A Vietnamese flower, a dockland union,
A mistress of release from a magazine's thighs,
This magdalene contracts more than favours,
the feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat.

A son of the swastika of '45 parading a peroxide standard.
Graffitti disciples conjure testaments of hatred,
Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire
     hedges.
This is Brixton Chess.
A knight for embankments folds his newspaper castle,
a creature of habit, begs the boatman's coin,
he'll fade with old soldiers in the grease stained roll call,
Linger with the heartburn of good friday's last supper

Son watches father scan obituary columns in search of absent school
     friends,
While a generation digests high fibre ignorance,
Cowering behind curtains and the taped up, painted windows,
Decriminalised genocide, provided door to door Belsens
Pandora's box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested
     heavens,
Waiting, the season of the button, the penultimate migration,
Radioactive perfumes, for the fashionably, for the terminally insane,
     insane,
Do you realise, do you realise, do you realise, this world is totally fugazi

Where are the prophets, where are the visionaries, where are the poets,
to breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary


All titles © Marillion Music/Charisma/Chappell

+ 2/02/01