Elvis Costello

Mistreat me darling and I might just disappear
Upon a freighter running dark out of Algiers
Put tiny grains in children’s tears
While taking 25% of all those flashbulbs and mementoes
From the mechanized divisions rolling over your frontiers

I saw my baby talking to a man today
Speaking softly in a confidential way
I saw a shadow pull his glove off
As a bluebird flew over
Life’s no pleasure
When you doubt the one you love

Who Are All These Strangers?

I never will go back again
Go back into the past
The flood is rising fast
You can break her window and look down
Into the muddy glass
For it’s a mirror or a lens to burn…

Now there's a deal done in Benghazi and Belgrade...
Upon a scimitar or other crooked blade
Ransacks and loots, vacated suits
And a pistol points but never shoots, an army sitting in a locomotive yard
Without their boots

Upstairs your man is painting rain out in the street
Imagines women that he’s destined still to meet
He’s trying sidetrack one to count on
Caught somewhere between a countess and a courtesan
There's only love to feign and then it’s gone

Who Are All These Strangers?

He’s a privateer as dusk gets near
A brigand after dark, his victim lined with chalk
A corsair filled with horsehair to the core
Dashed on eyes of Adamantine, you despised his stripling whine

That little smudger and the mouthpiece that he’s with
Using his clause just like a practised fingersmith
I dreamed I took his digit prints
And then I sewed them on a villain’s hands
And watched him ransom and demand
And then called the flatfoots in

I never will go back again
Go back into the past
The flood is rising fast
You can break her window and look down
Into the muddy glass
For it’s a mirror or a lens to burn…

Who Are All These Strangers?

All These Strangers

Sat upon a narrow bed
I thought about the things she said

All These Strangers

How I wished the night would end
Tried to stop the days ahead
I’d carve her name down in the wood
Some small remembrance if I could