Strange Tourist

Well it was all falling down and a long way from cheap
So tell me why did we live where we lived?
Above the old fish shop where they served up slop
And all the alley cats talked in their sleep

I spent a year there with B after I quit the Mitsubishi
Dragged my mattress up some stairs by the sea
Then watched the old van rust in the gusts of the coast
Ending its nightly expeditions for beer

B went psychotic in the navy and he wouldn't mend
Something 'bout a sunk junk and speed
Well he couldn't take the illness or endure the cure
And there was no point switching treatments in the Timor Sea

I have never known someone who need to talk so much
Or even fool himself disguising a guess
Well I just steered his bullshit through the next diversion
Never bothering with reality checks

I'm saying Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black
What the hell could be the matter with you?
And where do you come from and why you go collecting
Anything that turn the colour blue?

B took his refuge in the open where it stings
You'd think you'd seen him then he's gone in a blink
But once them Stilnox hit their target, don't trust nothing, no one
And don't go believing anything that you think

He'd say, "I'm half way through and I don't know what I'm doing
But I ain't feeling much of nothing at all
But it's my first time too, if that's a valid excuse
I'm gonna wait here for the engines to stall

I've seen the tracks of some giant, the smoke of some fire
Fused like hot sand in a bottleneck
Does all of beauty lie in being dead and gone
Or is all history made of chickens and their unhatched eggs

I've seen the spectre of a frigate on a dry rock face
A stone axe held together with an old bootlace
Anything betraying the drift of dead headway
You can shake it but it won't let go

All that so men can live like girls and keep their might pert
Digging music made by millionaires for car adverts
Save the whales, invade Iraq and have a hamburger
I can't distinguish between the nightmare and joke

I was in Tokyo once without any cash
And Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas
I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi
Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji"

I'm singing Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black
What the hell could be the matter with you?
And where do you come from and why you go collecting
Anything that turns the colour blue?

So when his pension got suspended, well that spelled the end
And I joined his life of leisure in flight
It's too hard to row a boat using a periscope
Sometimes you gotta do wrong to do right

He got in trouble years back, I haven't seen him since
In a men's room in a night club in Madrid
He sold some dexedrine or something to a plain clothes D
Then raised a stink so bad they ended up deporting him

And the last I heard he was as free as a bird
And into Scientology
Or into Heaven's Gate or Sharon Tate or in the Legionnaires
Or gone to Georgia with the Mujahideen

And someone else was walking eggshells in his birdcage
Someone else shared his unending lease on hamstrung rage
He was someone else's problem, and that made me glad
They can indulge him 'till he's ironclad

I'm singing Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black
What the hell could be the matter with you?
And where do you come from and why you go collecting
Anything that turn the colour blue?

I wound up working in a hospital
Renting TVs to the bored and the blind
It seems the DSS got sick of my BS
And had my unemployment privatised

They made a date with me, some agency
I went down there like a fool in love
They made a few phone calls, found a real cure-all
Like I wasn't miserable enough

Yeah, I was working night shift when he got there
The first time I'd seen a coma on the ward
Well the sister said he won't be needing TV now
He probably won't be needing nothing at all

He was in Tokyo for a while until he stabilised
They flew him back here and the story unfolded
They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara Forest
Where them hara-kiri weirdos go

And he died a little later, and was wheeled away
I blame his morbid fascination for it all
And his doubtless, groundless faith in his outdoorsmanship
He didn't kill himself - he didn't have the balls

Yeah, but hope dies last in a hospital
But has a habit of doing it next to you
While you shit-kick 'round with your eyes to the ground
Like a bowerbird appropriating anything the colour blue