The Lamplighter

Lyrics

There's a beat that belongs to the blue hour.
A footstep that falls between the day and the deep.
Before the moon, there was another keeper.
A rhythm the stones still keep.

My ledger was the almanac.
My clock was the sinking sun.
Four miles of wick and mantle,
The dusk run had begun.
From the ironworks to the quay,
Every corner knew my pace.
You had to be on time in 1883.
A docked wage for a minute out of place.

I was the keeper of the clockwork dark.
The man who carried a captured star.
With a lift and a twist, I made the mark,
And chased the shadows from the market bar.
A bloom of gas, a whisper-hiss of light,
I drew the map of a city's night.

The morning round was the ghost of the evening.
Same route, same cold in the bone.
Snuffing the glow the dawn was thieving.
Leaving the day to rise on its own.
The smell of coal-gas on my coat,
Number seven on the payroll sheet.
Just a number they wrote,
The steady engine of the cobbled street.

Then the wire came singing a different tune.
A hum in the wall, a flicker without a hand.
One street went bright beneath a glass-blown moon,
A new kind of order across theland.
The brass-pole shadow began to evanesce.
Neighborhood by neighborhood, the need grew less.

They still stand, some of them. Hollow shells.
The iron posts where my ladder leaned.
But the rhythm is gone. The church bell tells a different time.
Angle Street to Weaver's Row, I strike the spark, I make the glow.
Just once.