For Mr. Thomas (2000)

[Verse 1]
From faded newsprint used to wrap a fish
Inscrutably the muse selects your face
As I sit drinking namelessly in a nameless bar
Five thousand miles and thirty years away

[Verse 2]
With all the usual ceremonial you were crowned one night
King of the field where doctors nail the cows
To make of the cock's quill the rights of language
And the pricking heart a sword against the hours

[Verse 3]
Let smirking scholars writhe in their favoured bondage
To hold you plaintiff to the charge of art
Exhibit A: He falls on legendary lines
Singing mother I want a bullet in the heart

[Verse 4]
The judge in me sucks eggs and jerks the sacred meat
For the boy in me still dreams in Milk Wood town
Like two provincial bastards playing the galleries
I hold your photo to the mirror upside down

[Guitar Solo]

[Verse 5]
As bacon wafts through hungry streets, your ghost pervades
Just like an old ex-boxer aged twenty-two
Staged up like Falstaff or the wild Welsh Rimbaud
You'd laugh to see these monochromes they make of you

[Verse 6]
Ah, Mr. Thomas, let us ramble through the midnight fair
Let us throw old bottles at the ferris wheel
Let us paint library on the library, let us raid the moonlight
Let us steal away whatever we are supposed to steal

[Verse 7]
While the border guards check cards with their poker faces
Never mind who's winning but the stakes are rare
If this jack of thorns they let us hold outbids the joker
Let us sneak higher till the frost clings in our hair

[Verse 8]
Let us watch while the days grow daily more mundane
That rough God go striding with his shears
Hack wide the bellies of the swollen mountains
And rip molten heroes forth to their furious tears