Piano Magic: The Drowning Of St. Christopher

There's no heart in the men who run these mountain bars/All love extinguished by location and cold fronts/Dogs in the parking lot surround the car for scraps of affection, for eyes not glazed over like black ice/Thousands of kilometres of roughage and terracotta roofs/Horizons replaced by horizons/We run the belly of rainclouds between Madrid and Valencia, with the radio tuned into the weather we don't have/St Christopher drowns crossing the river/Firs blown onto the windscreen disperse like a pack of tiny black birds/Service stations are watched over from the hills by shepherds who spend all their days flooded by thought - a deafening meditation/The cowbells, like bloody church alarms, smashing the silence of grass, of the air/I am interviewed in a sleepy bar by a girl who wants me to explain "the warmth of nostalgia," incensed that I "glamourise sadness"/And after seven hours on the road, I have lost all defences - they are roadkill, torn up, gutted/At night, tiny red beacons crown lonely antennas/Everywhere is shepherded in the absence of gods/Cities spoil everything : that there is somewhere to go and something to do, when the partition between sleep and awake in the back of the van features such happy accidents - hazed dreams in an unfocused Super 8mm/On rainy nights, we are docked in the harbour of circular ballrooms playing to the shadows, playing to revolving mirrorballs/Our harbours are in brandy glasses/Our music is swilled/In hostels, fourth floor, bare rooms but for a bed and a sink, we stare vacant at sleeping guitars, wondering how many fucks and violence and drugs have intervalled us staring at sleeping guitars/And the taps can't be turned off/And there's suspect movement on the stairwell/Small pictures of boats in storms/ Watches and money in our shoes/We wake up and the building is still there and we're still in it, like miserable captains