"Babel" lyrics - PETER HAMMILL

Words upon words
Stack the tower of Babel
Brick on brick on straw on clay
But a whispering stirs
And the structure's unstable
When all the scaffold's stripped away.
We're ever quick to aver
That we are ready and able
But we can't say what's coming, come what may.

By definition self-obsessed
We strive to make ourselves plain
With words that pass the acid test
With passive thought in train.

Words upon words,
Fiction, folly and fable,
Each pregnant pause a dead giveaway...
Ploughing on undeterred
As the sell-bys expire on our labels
Though at length we'll have little or nothing to say
It would be too absurd
To spend life all agaze at our navels -
Oh, we've got such limited time to go on and explain.

So, running off at the mouth,
We all get carried away
Uncertain when it all goes south
If we mean what we say.

If we mean what we say...