European Christian Muslim Jew May the first at last bring peace to you From The Vistula to Scotland’s shores Let it today consign our wars To history where they belong And trust its union makes us strong Today let us start to tolerate To value and appreciate That in the difference of our skins and tongues We find a richness that becomes A quality to celebrate In every European state
This town has no ghost tours For all its ghosts are still alive And tonight they walk the perfect streets Where they are not allowed to die They linger in the cafes And they smoke their cigarettes And they tell each other all the tales That history forgets There are no lonely hearts here Keeping time or keeping mum Or keeping secrets from each other For fear of what they will become They dare not yet declare themselves Lest either should discover That when winter falls upon this town Each will yet betray the other
In shopping malls with prayer rooms the soft porn hides its nipples While mammon shoes the pretty feet of fashionista’s cripples Suicidal Hindus fail to prick the collective conscience Living nightmares building dream homes Above the height of nonsense Souks of gold from god knows where washed clean by unseen hands As Sim City on testosterone rises from the sand Here youth has lost its innocence and turned to rape and pillage To build media a city and knowledge just a village
Where money bubbles to the ground Our friends all help themselves The money goes on trinkets Their morality to hell In life’s business class these passengers Appease their trophy wives In the flatness of their beds And the sincerity of lies Beyond the umpteenth parallel Drawn by our fathers long ago The money now is vaporised But on must go the show
Sitting in an Irish bar drinking Tiger beer Is as close to racial integration as it ever gets round here Lebanese smoke Gauloise Philippina serve them Scotch Brazilians play football Italians sit and watch Tipsy English teachers practice provocation As a solitary Indian awaits reincarnation Americans sing love songs Australians sing along The Swedish cell phone silent The Polish girl long gone
Beneath a milk white monument to a slaughtered secret army Masters of the universe masticate on calamari The waitress in her jet-black hot-pants takes away their breath In the shadow of the valley of her father’s father’s death An old soldier gathers boxes of bruised raspberries and plums By the market’s silent testament to what he has not yet become Beneath the dislocated darkness love is sold or dissipated Its violence now violation among the violated All that we have ever known is handed down as new As what all of us are certain of and as all that we can do But which of is buying here and which of us is selling The then time of our knowledge or the now time of its telling