Polonium

Lyrics

They don't send for you often.
Only for the most particular work.
The work that must leave no sound.
The Pine Bar, Millennium Hotel.
Grosvenor Square is quiet tonight.
November first, 2006.
Two men wait for a third. Andrei, Dmitry.
They talk of business, old times.
And I wait, dissolved. Tasteless.
In a green china teacup.
A whisper from a Sarov laboratory, a ghost from 1898.
Marie named me for her lost Poland.
A name for freedom.
Funny, isn't it?
They don't use arsenic anymore.
Too loud, too common.
When a state wants to make a statement,
And leave no signature but my faint, blue glow...
They send for the alpha. The true original.
They send for me.
He arrives. Alexander.
Sits down. A sugar cube, a stir.
He doesn't taste the metal on the air.
He doesn't feel the heat I make myself.
Just the warmth of the tea.
A single sip is all it takes.
The alpha decay begins its quiet work.
Unraveling him from the inside.
No doctor will know what to look for.
Not for three weeks.
They don't use arsenic anymore.
Too loud, too common.
When a state wants to make a statement,
And leave no signature but my faint, blue glow...
They send for the alpha. The true original.
They send for me.
A microgram is a ghost in the machine.
A billion times more potent than cyanide.
I paint a trail through London.
On airplane seats, in hotel rooms, on the skin of other men.
A phantom for the Geiger counters to chase.
He writes his final words from a bed in University College Hospital.
Names the man who sent me.
But I am already home.
The teacup sits on the saucer.
Empty.
Wiped clean.
But I am still there.
Singing my quiet, radioactive song.