Modern

Song Modern
Artist Peter Hammill
Album The Margin +

Lyrics

Jericho's strange, throbbing with life at its heart -
people are drawn together, simultaneously torn apart....
Foundations are shattered in the city
inside the barricaded doors;
hiding behind their walls, lonely as night falls,
maybe the people are waiting for trumpets.
Babylon's strange, seventh wonder of the earth -
gardens ablaze in colour, slowly rotting in the dirt
and, with your head on fire, you can't really see.
The hanging gardens sing,
but with a hollow ring :
the life is false, it's killing me....
Don't look back or you'll turn to stone;
look around before your life is overgrown
with concrete slabs.
On your back the searching eyes that stab
between chintz curtains, glinting,
but never owning to a name...
like the inmates of asylums
all the citizens are contagiously insane....
Atlantis is strange, the explosion of an age -
no-one really knows what to do,
and the city is a cage.
It traps in ashen hours and concrete towers,
imprisons in the social order.
The city's lost its way,
madness takes hold today...
I can't live under water.