And maybe you're the Circle Line girl, trying so hard not to let on you know I'm looking at the way your toes poke out of your sandals, at funny angles to your feet, and how you know it turns me on

Or maybe you're the Spanish girl, playing with your hair as you wait for your friend in that wild octagon of mirrors the Tate calls a coffee shop ..... And oh, I can smell that hair from here, and I can see from eight different angles the way your nipples look through that thin black cotton top, reflected to infinity ..... And oh God it's places like that and purple-tipped prose like this, that's going to haemorrhage me girl .....

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

Or maybe you're the bay window girl in Wandsworth Town, in ripped jeans and open venetians, painting the difficult corner of an empty room white under a naked bulb, leaning across the bar at the top of your stepladder at the precise moment I'm passing on the steep street at the bottom of your garden in the gathering night ..... voyeur's delight

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

Or maybe you're the foundation painter at the Central School, looking so fine-boned I could carry you home in your portfolio case, laced up gently so you won't cry out on the bus on the way home, tied up lightly, because girl, how could I knowingly injure someone with your perfect lips and wrists, your exquisite structure ..... Oh little acrylic painter, I can kiss eggshells, I can be ginger, all the critics say I'm such a sensitive singer .....

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

And maybe you're listening to my voice now, on your Walkman or your bedsit Dansette, letting my songs slip into you on this quiet night in with your pads of doodles and your fingers full of pencils and low tar cigarettes ..... And the music's light and pleasant so you hardly notice what I'm singing about in 'Paper Wraps Rock' and 'Murderers, the Hope of Women', my voice is just a sound that pleases you, enters you and leaves you just the same, and that's how I want it to stay, because, you know .....

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

But some of those are bitter records, records which accuse women, girls like you, of using your attractiveness wantonly and wilfully to trap and to paralyse men who want them and can never have them, men who sometimes feel the perverse urge to trash the women they desire the most, who imagine they despise all those immaculate visions ..... what adolescent crap, what kind of idiot would sing that? Oh, not me .....

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

But you know sometimes I think that every man who writes, every man who paints or composes, deep soul or symphonies, it makes no difference, all those men are only making do with substitutes: Solomon, Confucius, Franz Kafka, they'd never have done if they'd been as beautiful as you, sitting cross-legged there with gentle music lapping around a promise, there where your thighs meet, of fertility a million artists couldn't compete with

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

And all the time I see you there in the eye of my mind, and all that cheap macho stuff about de Sade, misogyny, vanish in thin air and I'm moved to tears just like any other sucker who's been bruised by all the things that weren't to be, and yet who's ready to fall down on his knees in front of a woman and say "Whatever you may do, whatever you may be to me, despite the times we disagree, your ridiculous ambitions, your conventional inhibitions, I want you to know that I respect you, I accept you and I want you to accept me, I want to kiss you, kiss your stockinged knee, accept the uniquely soft flesh on the undersides of your hips"

Ooh it's true:
Girl I'm only doing it to be closer to you

And when I've won you, when I've fallen down in front of you and said "Damn Franz Kafka, damn the Thin White Duke (damn the Thin White Duke), it's you and you alone I'm doing this for" ..... When I'm through with heroes and pastiche, (throwing darts in lovers' eyes), when you've let me make love to you the slowest deepest way that I know how (when you do that for me baby), when I'm lying between those legs I longed so much for and it feels so good (everything), that's when I'll think of Paul Klee's epitaph: 'Here lies the painter Paul Klee, somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual, but far from close enough'

And girl, here I lie, far from close enough to you .....

- -by the flowers.