Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot : O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night ;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

:Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Suspended in Gaffa (Kate Bush)

Out in the garden
There's half of a heaven,
And we're only bluffing.
We're not ones for busting through walls,

But they've told us
Unless we can prove
That we're doing it,
We can't have it all.

He's gonna wangle
A way to get out of it.
She's an excuse
And a witness who'll talk when he's called.

But they've told us
Unless we can prove
That we're doing it,
We can't have it all.
We can't have it all.

"I caught a glimpse of a god, all shining and bright."

Suddenly my feet are feet of mud.
It all goes slo-mo.
I don't know why I'm crying.
Am I suspended in Gaffa?
Not until I'm ready for you,
Not until I'm ready for you
Can I have it all.

I try to get nearer,
But as it gets clearer
There's something appears in the way,
It's a plank in me eye,

With a camel
Who's trying to get through it,
Am I doing it?
Can I have it all now?

I pull out the plank and say
"Thank you for yanking me back
To the fact that there's
Always something to distract."

But sometimes it's hard
To know if I'm doing it right.
Can I have it all?
Can I have it all now?
We can't have it all.

"We all have a dream...maybe."

Suddenly my feet are feet of mud.
It all goes slo-mo.
I don't know why I'm crying.
Am I suspended in Gaffa?
Not until I'm ready for you,
Not until I'm ready for you
Can I have it all.

I won't open boxes
That I am told not to.
I'm not a Pandora.
I'm much more like

That girl in the mirror.
Between you and me
She don't stand a chance of getting anywhere at all.
Not anywhere at all.
No, not a thing.
She can't have it all.

"Mother, where are the angels? I'm scared of the changes."

Suddenly my feet are feet of mud.
It all goes slo-mo.
I don't know why I'm crying.
Am I suspended in Gaffa?
Not until I'm ready for you,
Not until I'm ready for you
Can I have it all.

I am too close for him ...by Wislawa Szymborska

I am too close for him to dream about me.
I'm not flying over him, not fleeing him
under the roots of trees. I am too close.
Not with my voice sings the fish in the net.
Not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too close. A large house is on fire
without my calling for help. Too close
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too close for me to enter as a guest
before whom the walls part.
Never again will I die so readily,
so far beyond the flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. I am too close,
too close—I hear the hiss
and see the glittering husk of that word,
as I lie immobilized in his embrace. He sleeps,
more available at this moment
to the ticket lady of a one-lion traveling circus
seen but once in his life
than to me lying beside him.
Now a valley grows for her in him, ochre-leaved,
closed off by a snowy mountain
in the azure air. I am too close
to fall out of the sky for him. My scream
might only awaken him. Poor me,
limited to my own form,
but I was a birch tree, I was a lizard,
I emerged from satins and sundials
my skins shimmering in different colors. I possessed
the grace to disappear from astonished eyes,
and that is the rich man's riches. I am too close,
too close for him to dream about me.
I slip my arm out from under his sleeping head.
It's numb, full of imaginary pins and needles.
And on the head of each, ready to be counted,
dance the fallen angels.