Can't Ignore The Train

(album: The Wishing Chair - 1985)

Steep is the water tower
Painted off-blue to match the sky
Can't ignore the train

Night walks in the valley silent
You could swear the earth just moved
Can't ignore the train

Dust to be kicked up
In the crack-faced idle sinister town

Screen door to the rail station
Devil in her, she ran alongside the wasted tracks
Hem pins darted in her calves
Can't ignore the train

One spoiled girl with the tidiest apology
Somehow wedged inside her throat
Can't ignore the train

Patience their virtue
But I never could abide by that
Dungeon life with electric light
A clean towel and a basin
Mantel figures mind their places
And laughs where they belong

Through adventure
We are not adventuresome

Rage to share with a wardrobe mirror
In a room so beige and cold
Can't ignore the train

Window days saw the children pick their street games on thirty, thirty
Thirty afternoons

Molly, the boys are
Starting in that rhyme again
Teasing more and more the second daughter
How she fell
Young locked in some folks' prison
Made to dwell
Till they're braiding her gray hair
Sitting in the wishing chair
Sitting in the wishing chair
Sitting in the wishing chair