Laughing Boy

by Clive James and Pete Atkin

In all the rooms I've hung my hat, in all the towns I've been
It stuns me I'm not dead already from the shambles that I've seen
I've seen a girl hold back her hair to light a cigarette
And things like that a man like me can't easily forget
I've got the only cure for life, and the cure for life is joy
I'm a crying man that everyone calls Laughing Boy

A kid once asked me in late September for a shilling for the guy
And I looked that little operator in her wheeling-dealing eye
And I tossed a bob with deep respect in her old man's trilby hat
It seems to me that a man like me could die of things like that
I've got the only cure for life, and the cure for life is joy
I'm a crying man that everyone calls Laughing Boy

I've seen landladies who lost their lovers at the time of Rupert Brooke
And they pressed the flowers from Sunday rambles and then forgot which book
And I paid the rent thinking 'Anyway, buddy, at least you won't get wet'
And I tried the bed and lay there thinking 'They haven't got you yet'
I've got the only cure for life, and the cure for life is joy
I'm a crying man that everyone calls Laughing Boy

I've read the labels on a hundred bottles for eyes and lips and hair
And I've seen girls breathe on their fingernails and wiggle them in the air
And I've often wondered who the hell remembers as far back as last night
It seems to me that a man like me is the only one who might
I've got the only cure for life, and the cure for life is joy
I'm a crying man that everyone calls Laughing Boy

Note (from Collected Poems)

This lyric was so clearly a personal cri de coeur that when we were on stage together Pete asked me to join in the singing. On tour in Britain, Australia and Hong Kong we would close the show with it, always carefully telling the audience beforehand that it was one of the first things we ever wrote together. Many years later, at the other end of my life, the landlady with the pressed flowers showed up again in my poem ‘Grief Has Its Time’.