Robyn Hitchcock - Idonia lyrics

When I saw you on the market
Standing by the phone
With your hair as dark as this
How could you be alone
All the ghosts in love with you
They craned their sorry necks
Like a Viennese machine that's
Just discovered sex

When I saw you on the bridge
You had to look away
If I thought to follow you
I'd just get in the way
Reaching for eternity, reaching for a chair
Reaching for the woman who
Is never even there, boys
Never even there when I saw your fingers
Folded round your albatross
Staring through the kitchen wall
At everything you've lost
Losing comes so easily when


You acquire the taste
Life is long and life is lost
And life is such a waste, boys
Life is just a waste

See the wrinkles in my hand
I am the lizard's son
Waiting for the alchemist to touch
Me with the sun when I saw your photograph
I knew we'd never meet
You were called Idonia, and I
Stayed in the street, boys
I stayed in the street

When I saw your eyes were closed
That was the best thing yet
Then you drove a caravan
Across this flimsy set
Crushed beneath your wheels still
My heart goes beating on
Beating for Idonia and everything she's done
Boy everything she's done

When I saw your pharaoh coming
Handsome gypsy lad
With his memory still wet from
All the fun he had funny how your ceiling is
Somebody else's floor
Feeling for Idonia beside a market store
Boys who won't be back no more