Occasionally the inability to sleep yields a pleasant surprise: I discovered Robyn Hitchcock's "The Ghost Ship" (Balloon Man, 1988) tonight. My first thought was that I loved it. My second was that if I hadn't known who wrote the song, I could easily have mistaken it for something by the Decemberists—the off-kilter rhyming couplets, the vague anachronism, the specific and slightly surreal details. It was therefore extremely gratifying to read this interview. I imagine someday there will be a very lovely cover.
The ghost ship haunts the sea
She'll come back and marry me
The rust is where her heart should be tonight
Her face is where her fingers were tonight
A glassy-checkered engine room
The speechless silence of the tomb
The manuscripts inside the womb unfurl
A girl translucent as a jellyfish
That palpitates upon a dish
She stings you with her gently falling curl
And sinking in the waters green tonight
I wonder where my lover's been tonight
The ghost ship changes course
And on the deck there stands a horse
Who's munching on sardines and gorse and hay
The captain trawls a net across the bay
The bubbles rising from the deep
Where dead men sing themselves to sleep
From oak and coral, they do seep to say
Okay, you read my future like a chart
See through my skin into my heart
That flutters in my ribcage like a bird
And the ghost ship sails on into someone's life
The air from bottles forms into
The skeletons of all the crew
In white, they dance against the blue and wail
Their curling bodies flail around the sail
The figurehead before the mast
Stares back into the golden past
Across the wrinkled sea so vast, forlorn
She mourns, she flutters round me like a moth
That beats against mosquito cloth
And tries to eat her way into my dreams
And sinking in the waters green tonight
I wonder where my love has been tonight
The melons on the riverbank
Are bulging through decaying planks
The beauty is so warm and dank and light
The captain wears a headless grin tonight
And silhouetted on the blue
The cook, the mate, the bosun too
They know not why or what they do at all
They fall like masonry in the abyss
That opens every time we kiss
I hear their laughter echo round the bay
And the ghost ship sails on into someone's life
And maybe with this for a dream, I can sleep.
The ghost ship haunts the sea
She'll come back and marry me
The rust is where her heart should be tonight
Her face is where her fingers were tonight
A glassy-checkered engine room
The speechless silence of the tomb
The manuscripts inside the womb unfurl
A girl translucent as a jellyfish
That palpitates upon a dish
She stings you with her gently falling curl
And sinking in the waters green tonight
I wonder where my lover's been tonight
The ghost ship changes course
And on the deck there stands a horse
Who's munching on sardines and gorse and hay
The captain trawls a net across the bay
The bubbles rising from the deep
Where dead men sing themselves to sleep
From oak and coral, they do seep to say
Okay, you read my future like a chart
See through my skin into my heart
That flutters in my ribcage like a bird
And the ghost ship sails on into someone's life
The air from bottles forms into
The skeletons of all the crew
In white, they dance against the blue and wail
Their curling bodies flail around the sail
The figurehead before the mast
Stares back into the golden past
Across the wrinkled sea so vast, forlorn
She mourns, she flutters round me like a moth
That beats against mosquito cloth
And tries to eat her way into my dreams
And sinking in the waters green tonight
I wonder where my love has been tonight
The melons on the riverbank
Are bulging through decaying planks
The beauty is so warm and dank and light
The captain wears a headless grin tonight
And silhouetted on the blue
The cook, the mate, the bosun too
They know not why or what they do at all
They fall like masonry in the abyss
That opens every time we kiss
I hear their laughter echo round the bay
And the ghost ship sails on into someone's life
And maybe with this for a dream, I can sleep.
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