Halley’s Comet, 1986

Go shake the sleepy headed children
No lie lie lumps in the bed
I'll light the stove and put water in the kettle

And jam and butter on the bread
Wake up you sleepy headed children wake up and out of bed
There's a visitor who's callin and he'll soon be gone again

Well I might be a kid with a sleepy old head
I don't believe it's right
I never heard an old visitor
Who's calling in the middle of the night
Well I'm goona tell this visitor I don't think it's polite
To come around here callin' when everyone's sleeping tight

And mumma said stop your moanin and put somethin' on your feet
This visitor is not the kind of fellow
Who you could talk to walking down the street
And go and tell your sister to put somethin on her feet
Wrap a blanket 'round your shoulder and out the door to suite

Now we've got nice real neighbours
Both living on the left and right
But I never thought I'd see them out standing
In the yard in the middle of the night
When I saw all our neighbours I got an awful fright
All out in their pyjamas starin' up to the deep dark night

There's the old man livin' in the corner
He's sayin' "look up! Look up!"
And the lady next door she's tryin' to pour
Hot tea in a little tin cup
She points and says, "Look up there follow my fingertip!"
And I stretched and strained and squinted
And I said I just give up

And she said, "That thing you're trying so hard to see
Don't look at it directly
It'll hide from you, like an old gecko on a gumtree."

Wildered my father's binoculars, help well that depends
If what he saw was a visitor and a scratch upon the lens
Then someone says "I see it!"
And another one says, "I think I see it!"
If there's a long and fiery tail, then that'll be it

There's more stars out tonight a thousand times the national flag
The old man's followed by the sky
Might printed from a page from the local rag
To the writer the Hyades to the left of the Pleiades
Like fishin' for an aspirin
Loose at the bottom of the bag

The Hyades are a bunch of stars all shaped like the capital A
And the other is a name of a videogame I always used to play
I played the game Pleiades all through the 1980s
Three dollars worth a twenty
I'd waste the whole damn day

It's strange to me how the odd can be
So quiet in the light of the moon
In the day we're told to not play on the road
Where the cars all race downhill
All up and down the daytime they race and howl
And hoon and send the cats all flyin'
Or else meet their old side ruin

We got five cats buried in the garden and three across the road
And I remember their furry little faces every time I mow
The grass around the garden and the grass across the road
Where we dig the bait worms wriggling
To the croak of an old cane toad

She said, "That thing you're trying to see don't look at it directly
It will hide from you, like an old gecko on a gumtree."