Grey Balloons by Paul Devine

The realities of the holy innocents
Aren’t Saints within their Sainted Rooms
All crawling through the catacombs
Where the skulls and bones are teeming

Their black robes are cracked and dead
Rooms all filled with grey balloons
And foundling’s skins and ghosts of parties
Phantoms wailing, screaming.

They pushed you up against the wall
With all the flesh and wherewithal
And the instinct to survive was like the urge to kill or stay alive
The need to fight or flight or die
Or rise to paradise
Or say goodbye or just apologise

Nuns and fathers looming
As the crucifix was hulking
Over backs made raw by birches and pale skin was grimed with blood
Oh the corridors were dark with muffled cries
And flies and stench of children denigrated for the holiness of God

And so God sits in his heaven
With his Christ and ghost and Saints
And he rejoices in the little pains his acolytes embrace
For a child conceived in bastardy
Is a stain upon the purity
Of Christianity and all that sacred insecurity

And come the day these children you abused and you assaulted
Will come up to Heaven
And stand in the halls exalted
And these fragile souls you tortured
In those mossy halls and pissy beds
Will beat the God and Christ and all the Trinity to death.

• Alternative
• gothic
• grand-guignol
• post-punk
• progressive
• United Kingdom