Pretzel Logic

by Donald Fagen

I would love to tour the Southland
In a travelling minstrel show
Yes, I'd love to tour the Southland
In a traveling minstrel show

Yes, I'm dying to be a star and make them laugh
Sound just like a record on the phonograph
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago

I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time

'Cause he looks so fine upon that hill
They tell me he was lonely, he's lonely still
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago

I stepped up on the platform
The man gave me the news
He said, 'You must be joking, son
'Where did you get those shoes?'

Well, I've seen them on the TV, the movie show
They say the times are changing, but I just don't know
These things are gone forever
Over a long time ago

Strawberry Fields Forever

by John Lennon

Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone
But it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me

No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can't, you know, tune in
But it's all right
That is, I think it's not too bad

Always, no sometimes, think it's me
But you know I know when it's a dream
I think I know, I mean, a 'Yes'
But it's all wrong
That is I think I disagree

Listen Up

by Noel Gallagher

'Listen up, what's the time?' said today
I'm going to speak my mind
Take me up to the top of the world
I want to see my crime

Day by day there's a man in a suit
Who's going to make you pay
For the thoughts that you think
And the words they won't let you say

One fine day
Going to leave you all behind
It wouldn't be so bad
If I had more time

Sailing down a river alone
I've been trying to find my way back home
But I don't believe in magic
Life is automatic
But I don't mind being on my own

All in the Golden Afternoon

by Lewis Carroll

All in the golden afternoon
      Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
      By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
      Our wanderings to guide.

Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour.
      Beneath such dreamy weather.
To beg a tale of breath too weak
      To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
      Against three tongues together?

Imperious Prima flashes forth
      Her edict 'to begin it'—
In gentler tone Secunda hopes
      'There will be nonsense in it!'—
While Tertia interrupts the tale
      Not more than once a minute.

Anon, to sudden silence won,
      In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
      Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
      And half believe it true.

And ever, as the story drained
      The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
      To put the subject by,
'The rest next time—' 'It is next time!'
      The happy voices cry.

Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
      Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
      And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
      Beneath the setting' sun.

Alice! a childish story take,
      And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
      In Memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers
      Pluck'd in a far-off land.

Hole in My Shoe

by Dave Mason

I looked to the sky
Where an elephant's eye
Was looking at me
From a bubblegum tree

And all that I knew
Was the hole in my shoe
Which was letting in water

I walked through a field
That just wasnt real
Where 100 tin soldiers
Would shoot at my shoulder

And all that I knew
Was the hole in my shoe
Which was letting in water

I started to fall
And suddenly woke
And the dew on the grass
Had soaked through my coat

And all that I knew
Was the hole in my shoe
Which was letting in water

Glasses

by Christopher Bradley

I'm going to buy me a new pair of glasses
X-ray glasses, so I can see through you
And I'm going to buy me a new pair of glasses
X-ray glasses, so I can tell you really want me

This time I swear I finally found my painted smile
Then it goes away

I'm going to buy me a new Maserati
Cool Maserati so you can see through me
And I'm going to drive to a rave in San Diego
Racing Winnebagos: man, I couldn't get much higher

This time I swear I finally found some peace of mind
Then it goes away

Such a shame, it seems
Wasting time on cheap cigars that don't explode

I'm going to find me a beautiful lover girl
She'll be so pretty that everyone will hate me
And I'm going to show off my beautiful lover girl
Looking like a cover girl, making everybody want me

This time I swear I finally found someone to love
Then she goes away

I'm going to buy me a new pair of glasses
In my Maserati so I can win a cover girl

The Mouse's Tale

by Lewis Carroll

Fury said to

a mouse, That

he met in the

house, 'Let

us both go

to law:  I

will prose-

cute you.—

Come, I'll

take no de-

nial:   We

must have

the trial ;

For really

this morn-

ing I've

nothing

to do.'

Said the

mouse to

the cur,

'Such a

trial, dear

Sir, With

no  jury

or judge,

would

be wast-

ing our

breath.'

'I'll be

judge,

I'll be

jury,'

said

cun-

ning

old

Fury.

' I'll

t r y

t h e

whole

cause,

a n d

con-

demn

you to

death.'

Royal Jelly

by Dan Bern

Mailboxes drip like lampposts
In the twisted birth canal of the coliseum
Rim job fairy teapots mask the temper-tantrum
O say, can you see 'em?

Stuffed cabbage is the darling of the laundromat
And the sorority mascot sat with the lumberjack
Pressing, passing, stinging
Half-synthetic fabrications of his time

The mouse with the overbite
Explained how the rabbits were ensnared
And the skinny scanty sylph thrashed the apothecary diplomat
Inside the three-eyed monkey within inches of his toaster-oven life

In my mind, I'm half-blind
My inner ref is mostly deaf
I'm smell-impaired, if you cared
My sense of taste is wasted
On the phosphorescent orange peels
Of San Francisco axe-encrusted frenzy
So let me touch you
Where the royal jelly gets made

Coloratura singers bringing weeds and social clingers
Hangers-on and fancy flingers to the dress ball
Mushrooms and bowling pins, stovepipe hats and other things
I can't recall from juvenile hall

We're so unlucky and stuff
Woodrow Wilson never had it so tough
Dairy Queen and Vaseline and Maybelline
Paul Bunyan and James Dean

Allegory agencies of pre-Raphaelite paganry
And Shenandoah tapestries compared with good mahogany
Collapsing the undying postcard romance

With feline perspicacity by the university
That night I held a paucity
Which you deemed common courtesy
I wasn't what you thought I'd be
I shouldn't have invited you to dance

In my tree I'm halfway free
And in my chair one-quarter there
In my dream one-sixteenth cream
In the coffee of the courtier
Of the sycophantic assistant to the king
So let me touch you
Where the royal jelly gets made

I'm Against It

by Groucho Marx

I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I'm against it

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it
And even when you've changed it or condensed it
I'm against it

I'm opposed to it
On general principle, I'm opposed to it

For months before my son was born
I used to yell from night to morn
'Whatever it is, I'm against it!'
And I've kept yelling since I first commenced it
'I'm against it!'

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

by John Linnell

Mr. Horrible! Mr. Horrible!
Telephone call for Mr. Horrible!
But before he can talk to the ugliness men
There's some horrible business left
For him to attend to

Something unpleasant has spilled on his brain
As he sponges it off, they say...

'Is this Horrible? Is this Horrible?
It's the ugliness men, Mr. Horrible
We're just trying to bug you
We thought that our dreadfulness
Might be a thing to annoy you with'

But Mr. Horrible says, 'I don't mind
The thing that bothers me is
Someone keeps moving my chair'

Would you mind if we balance this glass of milk
Where your visiting friend accidentally was killed?
Would it be okay with you if we wrote a reminder
Of things we'll forget to do today otherwise
Using a green magic marker
If it's alright, on the back of your head?

Mr. Horrible, Mr. Horrible
We're not done with you yet, Mr. Horrible
You have to try on these pants so the ugliness men
Can decide if they're just as embarrassing as we think
We have to be sure about this

But Mr. Horrible says, 'I don't mind
The thing that bothers me is
Someone keeps moving my chair'

On Language

by Stephen Fry

There's language, and there's speech. There's chess, and there's a game of chess. Imagine a piano keyboard: eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight! And yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: 'Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.'

Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother. And yet, oh and yet! we all of us spend our days saying the same things, time after weary time: 'I love you', 'Don't go in there', 'Get out', 'You have no right to say that', 'Stop it', 'Why should I?', 'That hurt', 'Help', 'Marjorie is dead'. That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or a handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a sputtering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

Language circumscribes beauty, confirms, confines, limns, and delineates; it colours and contains. Yet language is only a tool — a tool that we use to dig up the beauty that surrounds and is, we take, our only and absolute real. So I'm finding myself with some surprise and no little alarm hurling a paradox at you. Beauty is our only reality, and yet it is an ideal. It is the surface-tension of the membrane that stretches between us and the vision of beauty that language seeks to disperse, as a detergent might dissipate or dissolve a droplet of oil.

Let me explain, expound, expand, and exposit. I find you beautiful. But you are not beauty. Therefore you contain a property of beauty. Therefore the substance of which you exhibit a property must exist. Where is it? That is language's task.

Language pursues beauty, harries it, hounds it, courses it across the roughlands of enquiry and in so doing can itself be beautiful. Ripple on ripple, image on image, wheel within a wheel like the circles that we find in the windmills of our mind.

Language can be beautiful. 'And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.' Plenitude, dishes, martita, tumble, emolument, forage, smitten, plenum: words that have their own sonority and beauty which is extrinsic to their connotational or denotational referends.

So I'll leave you with a thought, a breath, a fruit that drops from the boughs of my imaginings. Think beauty, but be beautiful. Say beauty, but say it beautifully. Beauty is duty, and duty beauty. So there. Goodnight.

Supersonic

by Noel Gallagher

I need to be myself
I can't be no one else
I'm feeling supersonic, give me gin and tonic
You can have it all, but how much do you want it?

You make me laugh
Give me your autograph
Can I ride with you in your BMW
You can sail with me in my yellow submarine

You need to find out
'Cause no one's going to tell you what I'm on about
You need to find a way for what you want to say
But before tomorrow

'Cause my friend said he'd take you home
Sits in a corner all alone
He lives under a waterfall
Nobody can see him
Nobody can ever hear him call

You need to be yourself
You can't be no one else
I know a girl called Elsa, she's into Alka Seltzer
She sniffs it through a cane on a supersonic train

And she makes me laugh
I got her autograph
She done it with a doctor on a helicopter
She's sniffing in her tissue, selling the Big Issue

When she finds out
No one's going to tell her what I'm on about
You need to find a way for what you want to say
But before tomorrow

'Cause my friend said he'd take you home
Sits in a corner all alone
He lives under a waterfall
Nobody can see him
Nobody can ever hear him call

Meet James Ensor

by John Flansburgh

Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man

Before there were junk stores
Before there was junk
He lived with his mother
And the torments of Christ
The world was transformed
A crowd gathered round
Pressed against his window
So they could be the first

To meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Raise a glass and sit and stare
Understand the man

He lost all his friends
He didn't need his friends
He lived with his mother
And repeated himself
The world has forgotten
The world moved along
The crowd at his window
Went back to their homes

Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man

Come As You Are

by Kurt Cobain

Come, as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
The choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest, as a friend
As an old memory

Come, doused in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend
As an old memory

And I swear that I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun

Gold Soundz

by Stephen Malkmus

Go back to those gold soundz
And keep my anthem to yourself
Because it's nothing I don't like
Is it a crisis or a boring change?
When it's central, so essential
It has a nice ring when you laugh
At the lowlife opinions
And they're coming to the chorus now

I keep my address to yourself
'Cause we need secrets
We need secrets back right now

Because I never want to make you feel
That you're social, never ignored soul
Believe in what you want to do
And do you think that it's a major flaw
When they rise up in the falling rain?
And if you stay around with your knuckles ground down
The trial's over, the weapon's found

Keep my address to myself
Because it's secret
'Cause it's secret back right now

So drunk in the August sun
And you're the kind of girl I like
Because you're empty and I'm empty
And you can never quarantine the past
Did you remember in December
That I won't need you when I'm gone?
And if I go there, I won't stay there
Because I'm sitting here too long

I've been sitting here too long
And I've been wasted
Advocating that word for the last word
Last words come up, all you've got to waste

from Ulysses

by James Joyce
from Episode 11 — Sirens

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping answer.
O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
Horn. Hawhorn.
When first he saw. Alas!
Full tup. Full throb.
Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.
Martha! Come!
Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod henev erheard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlit nightcall: far, far.
I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.
Listen!
The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other, plash and silent roar.
Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.
You don't?
Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.
Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.
Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.
But wait!
Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.
Naminedamine. Preacher is he:
All gone. All fallen.
Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.
Amen! He gnashed in fury.
Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.
Bronzelydia by Minagold.
By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.
One rapped, one tapped, with a carra, with a cock.
Pray for him! Pray, good people!
His gouty fingers nakkering.
Big Benaben. Big Benben.
Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.
Pwee! Little wind piped wee.
True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your tschink with tschunk.
Fff! Oo!
Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?
Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.
Then not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.
Done.
Begin!

Elephant Stone

by Ian Brown

Burst into heaven
Kissing the cotton clouds
Arctic sheets and fields of wheat
I can't stop coming down

Your shrunken head
Looking down on me above
Send me home like an elephant stone
To smash my dream of love

Dreaming till the sun goes down
And night turns into day
Rooms are empty, I've got plenty
You could move in right away

Seems like there's a hole
In my dreams

Didn't your bed and bookshelf go
And run, run, run away
These four walls saw the rise and fall
And your midnight getaway

Seems like there's a hole
In my dreams
Or so it seems
Yet nothing means
Anything
Anymore

Well, I Never Did

by Dame Victoria Bennett
AKA Stephen Fry

Oh yes, I'll never forget that one! That was taken before they pulled down the gasworks and built that Netto Superstore. Oh, he looks good in his Littlewood's Keynote cardie, does our Alan! I said at the time, I said, 'Alan, if you want to get on in the world, you'd be wise to write down everything I say, because it's gold, is what I say. And don't hog the Peak Freenes, lad. Pass them 'round.'

Lovely boy, he was. Teeth weren't his strong feature, of course, and his hair wasn't what you might call Leslie Howard, but I always say, 'Teeth is teeth. What does it matter so long as you've got your wealth?'

He said, 'I can't wait to get out of here, Auntie Ivy, and make my fortune down south.'

I said, 'Alan,' I said, 'I may not be as cabbage-looking as my tongue is a fisherman's doily, but what's London got that you won't find in the Arndale Centre in Todmorden?' Well, he was stuck for a reply. I said, 'You want sophistication, you stick with us up here, love.' He knew I was right, bless him. I mean, we've got a body shop in the parade now. You can't move for Volvos in the autumn months. But then he's always had his head in the clouds, has our Alan.

Caught him trying to scour a milk pan with a tea bag once. I said, 'It's all very well knowing long words, but if you can't tell the difference between a box of brillo pads and a packet of Typhoo One-Cup, you'll never get on.' I'll go to the back of our fridge....

He did leave, though; got a scholarship to Oxford. I said, 'You make sure as there's somewhere as you can buy Kendall Mint Cake and a good bar of Wright's coal tar soap, because they've no idea, down there.' Well, I mean fancy ideas and tropical mix croutons are all very well, but they don't get the Vimto buttered, do they? For all your fine Italian red lettuce — which to my mind tastes as bitter as a Skipton wind.

He said, 'Auntie, I'll be fine.'

Well of course, I didn't know him when he came back. Green corduroy jacket and duffle coat, horn-rimmed spectacles you could eat parsley out of, and a head crammed with I don't know what. And books, you've never seen so many! Some of them that dirty I blushed to the roots of my Playtex. I said, 'Those books are going straight into the Hotpoint and no buts.' Came up lovely, they did. Amazing what a bit of Lenor can do if you've a mind.

No, but that Oxford and his smart friends, they've changed him. Ideas, that's what it is. I said, 'What use is ideas when you've a capon to baste and the tally-man's due any minute? Name an idea,' I said, 'that can get the front steps scrubbed, the sausages pricked, and the navel oranges squeezed in time for a meat tea and finger buffet.' Well, he didn't know which way to look.

These Oxford types, they're all apricot facial scrub and yesterday's suet turnover: to look at them you'd think a packet of Bachelor's Savoury Rice wouldn't melt in their Vosene Medicated, but they've no savvy. I could take a Black & Decker nose drill to the pack of them and still have change left over for a bag of peanut brittle.

Left home, of course. Got involved with the BBC, all party eggs and tomato chutney. Next thing I know, he's got a damehood and a brand new hostess trolley to show for it. They'll fall for anything, them Londoners.

Well, I'm off down to Morrison's for a jar of melon lip balm and a four-pack of interuterine devices. Got that Pat Routledge 'round for elocution lessons at twelve. Tarra!

Deck Us All with Boston Charlie

by Walt Kelly

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!