The Game - Roy Harper

There’s an owl in the valley fixing his prey

He’s not counting the tally

It’s down to what comes up before the day

And the trees in the orchard were taken from a narrow view of time

Where the minds of the tortured perpetuated patron saints of crime

Oh civilisation

I can fit into your puzzle but it’s hardly, hardly ever a hold

And I’ll tell you, yeah yeah, tell you the trouble

The habits I’ve got are more than 10.000 years old

And we cannot sell our souls to learning morals

Big brother is no place for us to slide

We cannot live by numbers or on laurels

And hardly on how far from death we hide

And it’s not a case of rampant paranoia

But just an age I’d love to see unborn

Not that I’d be missing playing Goya

More like I feel awkward passing on

Civilisation, civilisation down to my children

Without a question

While the prophets of freedom, battery farming brains for narrow minds

Have decided, yes they decided that meaning is far beyond the lives they left

behind

As two thirds of the population dine

On scraps in shadow lengthening with time

While propaganda spreads the same old theme

You is me and we can change the game, bullshit

Oh but how many times have we written these lines

And delivered these signs and not made it happen

Walking the tightrope of taking our head off

Losing the rhythm, idealising and all criticising

And not realising that we’ve changed and left and we’ve gone

And sad to be leaving the things we believe in but time has a way and we fly

The next age is born and the old hands are gone and done in the wink of an eye

No point in passing bad reason good guessing, no time for massing much more

than can flourish with love

And right now, my darling, I’m lying here dreaming of feeling, no daylight

between us

So wherever you are and whenever I’m there is someplace we’ve got to be ours

Can we right-heartedly stand in this light and see what might turn out to be

crazy enough, enough to be we?

When we’ve had a past sad enough to last for sometime into the future

These storms have torn and true love is alone and the past is almost a failure

Consciences burn in the programme turn, computing the social behaviour

But yoke revolts, the foundation bolts and cries for yet another saviour

And I’d pack my things on a pair of wings and tomorrow I’d be parting

With the summer birds and the winter herds for a place to face a new heart in

But it makes no difference, where I am I’m in the game first hand

There are no certain answers and no time to understand

The rules are set to paradox, coercion and blind faith

The goal’s a changing paradise, a moment out of date

The dream is righteous grandeur fit to flood the universe

The fact is more than meets the eye but less than runs the earth,

running the earth

And the prisoner of the present paces up and down inside his cell

He’s the living replacement, somersaulting from this psychic well

Screaming: 'I'm the sponsor of a hell'

Voices like the sea inside a shell

Telling me I cannot stake a claim

Possession is a clue but not the game

So please leave this world as clean as when you came

So please leave this world as clean as when you came

Please leave this world as clean as when you came

Please leave this world as clean as when you came

Please leave this world as clean as when you came