The Adventure Part One

The young lad sat in the old school room To him the place felt like a tomb He knew that he would be leaving soon He felt restless He got a job on the factory floor This just seemed to be a bore So he quit when he could take no more The world was there to see He packed his gear in an ancient grip And set out on an adventure trip To the Pool of London to join a ship And ran away to sea Ten men packed in a cabin tight Snoring and breaking wind all night But he could cope with this all right He was on the move Soon they were landing on foreign shores Where they took on cargo and fresh stores And drank and brawled and slept with whores Then off again to sea He saw the turtles and sharks and whale Ships under steam and under sail Felt both the roll of a force ten gale And the calm of an island lee He thought of lads he had left at school On the factory floor or playing pool Knowing that they would be missing it all Glad he wasn’t with them Through Suez or the Panama Rio or to Zanzibar Nowhere seemed to be too far To tie up at a quay He crossed the Great Australian Bight Where gigantic waves all toped with white Sparkling with Phosphorescent light Came crashing over the foc’sle He’d watched lovely Polynesian girls Diving naked in search of pearls The vision blurred as the water swirls Some vision He’d stood on deck when a seamen died Watched the corpse slipped over the side Sinking slowly under the tide Gone forever He’d sailed beneath the Golden Gate By Alkatraz where the convicts wait All hoping to dodge a grisly fate Electric chair He’d seen bars explode in a vicious fight Or sometimes sat on a tropic night Watching fireflies flash iridescent light How relaxing He’d seen men crazy through too much dope Sailed round the horn and the cape of hope Been offered a woman for a bar of soap That’s poverty He travelled the globe both far and nigh From the Norway fjord to old Shanghai This was the life of sea and sky This was the life for he He’d met with the hero and with the liar Saw the sun go down like a ball of fire Thought of this life he would never tire Things were changing