I Was a Teenage Sowing Machine

I was a teenage sowing machine
I lay dying under a mangled iron bridge
The Prime Minister was a dotted line down the middle of the road
Mark the Herald angel crowed bantam cock in titanium orange glow of overseas war

I dropped supermarkets over Vietnam
The old singer-sowing machine emits a scream of silence
I forgot the contents in the TV box and floated on an oil slick

O memory queen merry queen stitch one hack one stitch me two
The playing fields looked at you with eyes like cow’s prunes
Down the middle of the M1, I set beers up like traffic cones
Black umbrellas covered them under that sky less coma

The dust from cremated coffins caked the streets of suburbia
Johnny boy went home wrapped in the black curtains
In the lid of the drain I saw the face of Julius Caesar
The coal miners’ strike came back as a hurricane

The sowing machine appeared in Hyde Park as the Virgin Mary
Inside the case, the bomb squad found a crucifix that scampered away like a mouse
The lawn sprinklers became men with machine guns
And the walls of banks were made with lottery tickets

A little gem lettuce made its first appearance
When virtual reality grew from the horn of a Gargoyle
That jumped over a church with a television crew
To see the past, the present and the future turned away at the door