Arles

MP3

Written: 1994
Released: 2000 on 'Cupid Is A Drunkard'
Notes: Many years ago, having left art school when
I was 18, I went to live in Arles in the south of France...
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On the bridge stands a lover who stares at the river
And waits for the other half of his dream,
He's been waiting so long his clothes are in rags
And he carries his world in two plastic bags
Just in case she should come, and he wasn't there
For her diamond tongue and her waterfall hair,
Though these poor backstreets are alive with girls favours
And American icons and thirty-two flavours
Of the stench of greed and despair,
But the only stars and stripes you'll see here
Are the stars in tarts eyes and the stripes on the sleeves
Of a sailor who laughs in her face as he leaves.

Arles, I remember you well,
The days were long
And the nights were still,
In this old hotel,
Where Igor dressed for the bulls.

And down by the Rhone, where the poor children skim
Their stones at the waves that wash out and wash in,
A father seeks work while a mother seeks him,
As the girls sit and wait for their ships to come in;
There's a girl in the corner, her dress off her shoulder,
Laughs like she's young though she looks much older,
And tracing the lines that her life won't forgive her,
She purses her lips into the cracked mirror
And paints her face, like a mural on a slum,
But who will wake there when morning has come
Is anyone's guess, as she drinks up her drink,
Then pours out another and tries not to think.

Arles, I remember you well,
The days were long
And the nights were still,
In this old hotel,
Where Igor left for the bulls.

And the drunks are drinking their lives and they're thinking
Of ways of sinking the desperate cargo
Of their amorous flies into one of those bitches
Who talk like lavender but think like ditches,
But I leave them behind me and walk down to the kitchens
Where Isabelle looks so tired but so pretty,
And the old men shout 'begone with you boy,
Or sing us a song of when we were young',
So I sit on a wall by the banks of the Rhone
Where the drunks and drunkesses all make their homes,
These cold pavement sailors who drown on dry land,
They sleep where they fall and they piss where they stand,
While Dragoslov sits at the end of the bar,
Cursing his luck, or cursing the Tzar,
And how Russia will never see his like again.

Arles, I remember you well,
The days were long
And the nights were still,
Falling in love with Isabelle,
As Igor moved in for the kill.


© Philip Jeays 1994