All Home.
Two A city where nothing much happens except everything.
Three Where everyone is so entirely involved in their own
One ‘nothing much’
Three That they forget about the everything happening elsewhere.
Two And the thing is, if we’re being honest with you,
One And that’s all we want to be –
Two It’s important that we tell you that we have no idea what we’re doing.
One We need you to understand the history here.
Three See –
One We were thirteen once, with our fists full of beer that we jacked3 from the offie,
Three We lived without fear.
Two We looked up to our elders,
Three And awaited the days
Two When we’d be looked up to by kids half our age.
Three The years passed,
One We got wasted in raves and felt
Two Godlike.
Three Held spliffs4 up in the dark of the party like
Two Fog lights.
One We were children in a city of
Two Dogfights and rock pipes,5
One Surrounded by
Two Deadbeats and lost types
Three London belonged to
All Us
Two We smoked skunk6 on the bus.
Three Everything was ours.
One We got thumped in the guts but
All Stood firm.
Three We was young and we trusted each other,
Two It was all romantic and real.
Three We was frantic and full of our feelings and laughing and squealing,
One Holding our sides beneath the unfolding of skies in the evening.
Two Ah, but things happened.
Three Our eyes got
One Dimmer
Three And our dreams got
One Flattened.
Two We got older, didn’t we? We got responsibilities,
One Started seeing our defiance as arrogance and stupidity.
Two We used to be rebellious
Three And angry
One And in it all together,
Three But time passed and we realised
Two Nothing
One Lasts
Three Forever.
Two So now we carry it within us, the fact we used to be
One Eternal,
Two Before the world caught up and we forgot what we was living for.
Three We became
One The inmate,
Two The guard,
Three And the key that locked the prison door.
Two We used to skim the surface
One Till we sank and hit the river floor.
Two We realised,
One This is all there is.
Three There really isn’t more.
One Staring down the barrel
Two Of an empty bottle
Three Asking it to give us
All More.
One Hearts beating
Three Slower than they used to, stressing over bills to pay,
Two A million distractions just to fill the day,
Three Faces greyer than before. It’s not our world no more
One It’s someone else’s.
Two We’re less empathetic and more
Three Selfish,
Two Less independent and more
Three Helpless.
Two Thing is though,
One We soldier on through the cityscape,
Two Trying to carve out a niche for ourselves in our little ways.
Three Life’s great,
One Life’s awful.
Two Repetitions and figure eights,
One We’re living like our best days
Two Have already slipped away.