Silver - Peter Hammill

You lay your plans, I take them as they come

I understand: we dance to different drums

It’s not in any schoolbook

You’re here to teach a lesson to us all…

We play by different rule-books

What you say, what you do

They’re such different things, which is true?

Now the telephone rings, Mephistopheles calling…

Forty pieces for each lie you’ve told

I hope your linings as they all unfold are silver

Once we were friends in our idealist days

Still, let’s pretend, it’s funny in a way

That now our friendship’s token

You like to say I owe you everything —

Some debts remain unspoken

Double talk, double standards

You speak with two tongues, truth’s abandoned

All life has become one-way traffic to lucre

You take your meetings on the cloth of gold

Just down the river from the lives you’ve sold for silver

The silver crossed your palm

Oh, can you see the future?

I hope you’ll know when you sold your soul

Argente, argent

All the things you’ve done will carry their own taint

And a day will come when you chorus the complaint

That your friends don’t do you fairly;

The back you turned, the shoulders that you shrugged

Now fit the blame quite squarely

What you want, what you need

Your emotional greed all-consuming

But no hearts will bleed and the coffers are empty

Yes, in the end you’d give it all away

But on the sockets of your eyes they lay the silver