Go shake the sleepy head of children
All lying like lumps in the bed I'll light
the stove and pour wa ter in the
kettle
And jam and butter on the bread
Wake up you sleepy -headed children
Wake up and out of bed
There's a visitor who's calling
And he'll soon be gone
again
Well, I might be a kid with a sleepy old head,
but I don't believe it's right
I never heard an old visitor come call
in' in the middle of the night
Well, I'm gonna tell this visitor
I don't think it's polite
To come around here callin' when everyone's
sleepin' tight
And mama says stop your moaning
and put something on your feet
This visitor is not the kind of fella you can
talk to walking down the street
And go and tell your sister
to put something on her feet
And wrap a blanket around your shoulder
And out the door to be sweet
Now we've got real nice neighbours
Both living on the left and the right
But I never thought I'd
see them out standing
In the yard in the middle of the night
When I saw all our neigh
bours I got an awful fright
All out in their pyjamas
Staring up into the deep dark
night
There's the old man living on the corner
And he's saying look up, look up
And the lady next door,
she's trying to pour hot tea in a little tin cup
She points and says, look up there,
follow my fingertip
And I stretched and
strained and squinted
And I said, I'd just give up
And she said,
that thing you're trying so hard to see
Don't look at it directly
It'll hide from you like an old gecko
on a gum tree
Well did my father's binoculars help?
Well that depends
If what he saw was a visitor and
not a scratch upon the lens
Then someone says I see it,
and another one says I think I see it
If there's a long and fiery tale,
then that'll be it
There's more stars out tonight,
a thousand times the national flag
And the old man's following a sky map
printed on the page from a local rag
To the right of the
High 80s, to the left of the
Pleiades
Like fishing for an aspirin,
loose at the bottom of a bag
The
High 80s are a bunch of stars
all shaped like the capital
A
And the other is the name of a video
game I always used to play
I played the gameplay 80s
all through the 1980s
3 worth of 20s
I'd waste the whole damn
day
It's strange to me how the yard can
be so quiet in the light of the moon
In the day we're told to not play on the
road where the cars all race and hoon
All up and down the day time they
race and howl and hoon
And send the cats all flying or else
meet their roadside ruin
We got five cats buried in the
garden and three across the road
and I remember their furry little faces every
time I mowed the grass around the
garden and the grass across the road where
we dig the bait worms wriggling to
the croak of an old cane toe
she said that thing you're trying to
see don't look at it directly
It'll hide from you like an old gecko on a gum tree
I still think of that visitor
Blazing through the endless black
If I'm still alive I'll be 85
If he ever makes it back
Blazing out a trail
Through the deep and silent black
He'll never look behind him,
and he'll never leave his track
Everything goes in circles,
we head back to where we've been
And all become the aggregate
sum of what lay in between
It sure has been eye -opening,
all the places that I've been
But that night -time sky ablaze,
all brilliant and amazing
Above the house that I was raised in,
still the prettiest thing I've seen
you