All These Strangers - Elvis Costello

"Mistreat me darling and I might just disappear"
Upon freighter running dark out of Algiers
Put tiny grains in children's tears
While taking twenty five percent of all those flashbulbs and mementos
From the mechanized divisions rolling over your frontiers

I saw my baby talking to a man to day
Speaking softly in a confidential way
I saw her shadow pull his glove off
As a bluebird flew over
Life's is no pleasure
When you doubt the one you love

Who are all these strangers?

I never will, go back again
Go back into the past
The flood is rising fast
You can break a window and look down
Into a muddy glass
It's mirror or lens to burn

There was a deal done in Benghazi and Belgrade
Upon a scimitar or other crooked blade
Ransacks and loots, vacated suits
And a pistol points but never shoots,
Army sitting in a locomotive yard without their boots

Upstairs your man is painting rain out in the street
Imagines woman that he's destined still to meet
He's trying sidetrack, one to count on
Caught somewhere between a countess and a courtesan
And it's only love to feign and then it's gone

Who are all these strangers?

He's a privateer as dusk gets near
A brigand after dark, his victim lined with chalk
A corsair, filled with horsehair to the core
Dashed on eyes of adamantine, you despised his stripling whine

That little smudger and the mouthpiece that he's with
Using his claws just like a practiced fingersmith
I dreamed I took his digit prints
And then I sewed then on a villain's hands
Watched him ransom and demand
And then called the flatfoots in

I never will go back again
Go back into the past
The flood is rising fast
You can break the window and look down
Into the muddy glass
For it's a mirror or lens to burn

Who are all these strangers?
All these strangers

Sat upon a narrow bed
I thought about the things she said
All these strangers

How I wished the night would end
Tried to stop the days ahead
I'd carve her name down in the wood
Some small remembrance if I could