Closer To You

And maybe you're the Circle Line girl
Trying so hard not to let on you know I'm looking
At the way your toes poke out of your sandals
At funny angles to your feet
And how you know it turns me on

Or maybe you're the Spanish girl
Playing with your hair as you wait for your friend
In that wild octagon of mirrors the Tate calls a coffee shop
And oh, I can smell that hair from here
And I can see from eight different angles
The way your nipples look through that thin black cotton top
Reflected to infinity
And oh God it's places like that and purple-tipped prose like this
That's going to haemorrhage me girl

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

Or maybe you're the bay window girl in Wandsworth Town
In ripped jeans and open venetians
Painting the difficult corner of an empty room white under a naked bulb
Leaning across the bar at the top of your stepladder
At the precise moment I'm passing on the steep street
At the bottom of your garden in the gathering night
Voyeur's delight

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

Or maybe you're the foundation painter at the Central School looking so
Fine-boned I could carry you home in your portfolio case, laced up gently
So you won't cry out on the bus on the way home, tied up lightly
Because girl, how could I knowingly injure someone with your perfect lips
And wrists, your exquisite structure. . . Oh little acrylic painter, I can kiss
Eggshells, I can be ginger, all the critics say I'm such a sensitive singer

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

And maybe you're listening to my voice now, on your Walkman or your bedsit
Dansette, letting my songs slip into you on this quiet night in with your pads of
Doodles and your fingers full of pencils and low tar cigarettes. . . And the music's
Light and pleasant so you hardly notice what I'm singing about in 'Paper Wraps
Rock' and 'Murderers, the Hope of Women', my songs are just a sound that enters
You and leaves you just the same, and that's how I want it to stay, because

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

But some of those are bitter records, records which accuse women, girls like you
Of using your attractiveness wantonly and wilfully to trap and to paralyse men
Who want them and can never have them, men who sometimes feel the perverse
Urge to trash the women they desire the most, who imagine they despise all those
Immaculate visions... What adolescent crap, what kind of idiot would sing that?
Oh not me, because

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

But you know sometimes I think that every man who writes, every man who
Paints or composes, deep soul or symphonies, it makes no difference, all those
Men are only making do with substitutes: Solomon, Confucius, Franz Kafka, they'd
Never have done if they'd been as beautiful as you, sitting cross-legged there
With gentle music lapping around a promise, there where your thighs meet, of
Fertility a million artists couldn't compete with

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

And all the time I see you there in the eye of my mind, and all that cheap macho
Stuff about de Sade and misogyny vanishes in thin air and I'm moved to tears
Just like any other sucker who's been bruised by all the things that weren't to be
And yet who's ready to fall down on his knees in front of a woman and say
'Whatever you may do, whatever you may be to me, I want you to know that I
Respect you, I accept you and I want you to accept me, I want to kiss you, kiss
Your stockinged knee, accept the uniquely soft flesh on the undersides
Of your hips

Ooh it's true
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

And when I've won you, when I've fallen down in front of you and said
'Damn Franz Kafka, damn the Thin White Duke, it's you and you alone I'm doing
This for'... When I'm through with heroes and pastiche, ('throwing darts in lovers'
Eyes'), when you've let me make love to you the slowest deepest way that I
Know how (when you do that for me baby) and it feels so good, that's when I'll
Think of Paul Klee's epitaph: 'Here lies the painter Paul Klee, somewhat closer to
The heart of creation, but far from close enough'

And girl, here I lie, far from close enough to you