Halley's Comet, 1986

Go shake the sleepy headed children
No lie lie lumps in the bed
I'll light the stove and put water 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 callin and he'll soon be gone again

Well I might be a kid with a sleepy old head
I don't believe it's right
I never heard of no visitor
Who comes calling in the middle of the night
Well I'm goona tell this visitor I don't think it's polite
To come around here callin' when everyone's sleeping tight

And mumma said stop your moanin' and put somethin' on your feet
This visitor is not the kind of fellow you can talk to walking down the street
And go and tell your sister to put somethin on her feet
Wrap a blanket 'round your shoulder and out the door toot sweet

Now we've got nice real neighbours both living on the left and 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 neighbours I got an awful fright
All out in their pyjamas starin' up into the deep dark night

There's the old man livin' in the corner and he's sayin' "look up! Look up!"
And the lady next door she's tryin' 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 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 gumtree."

Well, did my father's binoculars help? Well that depends
If what he saw was a visitor and 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 tail, then that'll be it

There's more stars out tonight a thousand times the national flag
The old man's followed by the sky
Might printed from a page from the local rag
To the writer the Hyades to the left of the Pleiades
Like fishin' for an aspirin
Loose at the bottom of the bag

The Hyades are a bunch of stars all shaped like the capital A
And the other is a name of a videogame I always used to play
I played the game Pliades all through the 1980s
Three dollars worth of twenty
I'd waste the whole damn day

It's strange to me how the yaed 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 hoom
All up and down the daytime they race and howl
And hoom and send the cats all flyin'
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 mowd
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 toad

She said, "That thing you're trying to see don't look at it directly
It will hide from you, like an old gecko on a gumtree."

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-openin' all the places that I've been
But that night time sky are blazin', all brilliant and amazin'
Above the house that I was raised in
Still the prettiest thing I've seen