All These Strangers

Album: National Ransom (2010)
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  • "Mistreat me darling and I might just disappear"
    Upon freighter running dark out of Algiers
    Put tiny grains in children's tears
    While taking twenty five percent of all those flashbulbs and mementos
    From the mechanized divisions rolling over your frontiers

    I saw my baby talking to a man to day
    Speaking softly in a confidential way
    I saw her shadow pull his glove off
    As a bluebird flew over
    Life's is 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 a window and look down
    Into a muddy glass
    It's mirror or lens to burn

    There was 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,
    Army sitting in a locomotive yard without their boots

    Upstairs your man is painting rain out in the street
    Imagines woman that he's destined still to meet
    He's trying sidetrack, one to count on
    Caught somewhere between a countess and a courtesan
    And it'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 claws just like a practiced fingersmith
    I dreamed I took his digit prints
    And then I sewed then on a villain's hands
    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 the window and look down
    Into the muddy glass
    For it's a mirror or 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 Writer/s: DECLAN PATRICK ALOYIUS MACMANUS, T-BONE BURNETT
    Publisher: BMG Rights Management, Spirit Music Group
    Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

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