Strange Tourist

It was all falling down and a long way from cheap
 So tell me why did we live where we lived?
 Above the old fish shop where they served up slop
 And all the alley cats talked in their sleep
 I spent a year there with B
 After I quit the Mitsubishi,
 Dragged my mattress up some stairs by the sea
 Then watched the old van rust in the gusts of the coast
 Ending its knightly expeditions for beer
 B went psychotic in the navy and he wouldn't mend
 Something about a sunk junk and speed
 Well he couldn't shake the illness or endure the cure
 And there was no point switching treatments in the
 Timor Sea
 I have never known someone who needed to talk so much
 Or even fool himself disguising a guess
 I just steered his bullshit through the next diversion
 Never bothering with reality checks
 Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black
 What the hell could be the matter with you?
 Where did you come from and why'd you go collecting
 Anything that turns the colour blue?
 ♪
 B took his refuge in the open where it stings
 You think you'd seen him but he's gone in a blink
 Once those Stilnox hit their target don't trust nothing,
 No one
 And don't go believing anything that you think
 He'd say, "I'm half way through
 But I don't know what I'm doing
 I ain't feeling much of nothing at all
 But it's my first time too, if that's a valid excuse
 I'm going to wait here for the engines to stall
 I've seen the tracks of some giant, the smoke of some fire
 Fuse like hot sands in a bottleneck
 Does all of beauty lie in being dead and gone
 Or is all history made of chickens and their unhatched eggs
 I've seen the specter of a frigate on a dry rock face
 A stone axe held together with an old bootlace
 Anything betraying the drift of dead headway
 You can shake it but it won't let go
 All that so men can live like girls to keep their might pert
 Digging music made by millionaires for car adverts
 Save the whales, invade Iraq and have a hamburger
 I can't distinguish between the nightmare and the joke
 I was in Tokyo once without any cash
 Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas
 I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi
 Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji"
 Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black
 What the hell could be the matter with you?
 Where did you come from and why'd you go collecting
 Anything that turns the colour blue?
 ♪
 But when his pension got suspended,
 Well that spelled the end
 And I joined his life of leisure in flight
 It's too hard to row a boat using a periscope
 Sometimes you gotta do wrong to do right
 He got in trouble years back, I haven't see him since
 In a men's room in a night club in Madrid
 He sold some Dexedrine or something to a plain clothes D
 Then raised a stink so bad they ended up deporting him
 Then last I heard he was as free as a bird or into Scientology
 Or into Heaven's Gate or Sharon Tate
 Or in the Legionnaires
 Or gone to Georgia with the Mujahideen
 And someone else was walking eggshells in his birdcage
 Someone else shared his unending lease on hamstrung rage
 He was someone else's problem, and that made me glad
 They can indulge him 'till he's ironclad
 Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black
 What the hell could be the matter with you?
 Where did you come from and why'd you go collecting
 Anything that turns the colour blue?
 ♪
 I wound up working in a hospital
 Renting TV's to the bored and the blind
 Seems the DSS got sick of my BS
 And had my unemployment privatized
 They made a date with me, some agency
 And I went down there like a fool in love
 They made a few phone calls, found a real cure-all
 Like I wasn't miserable enough
 I was working night shift when he got there
 The first time I'd seen a coma on the ward
 The sister said he won't be needing TV now
 Probably won't be needing nothing at all
 He was in Tokyo for once until he stabilized
 They flew him back here and the story unfolded
 They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest
 Where those harrakiri weirdos go
 He died a little later, and was wheeled away
 I'd blame his morbid fascination for it all
 And his doubtless, groundless faith
 In his outdoorsmanship
 He didn't kill himself, he didn't have the balls
 Hope dies last in a hospital
 But has a habit of doing it next to you
 While you shit kick around with your eyes to the ground
 Like a bowerbird appropriating anything
 The colour blue.