There’s a village on top of a mountain
That’s always surrounded by mist,
They have a miraculous fountain
Allowing the folk to exist,
And no-one remembers the world below
They think that they float in the void,
Their library holds a single book
Called something, ‘According to Freud’.

They choose a new partner every night
In a version of musical chairs,
Nobody knows who belongs to who
And nobody really cares,
The women weave and the men deceive
In the way that it’s been for years,
And then at night, they put out the light
And lie back, counting the stars.

They’re trying to bottle the moonbeams,
To capture the secret of light,
And catch the sparkling frost that melts
Up on the mountain’s height,
The day that a mountaineer appeared
Climbing up out of the mist,
They thought the devil had somehow reared
Out of his precipice.

The villagers gradually dwindled,
They died or they jumped right off,
He spoke to them in a different tongue
And they said that they’d had enough.
He tried in vain to explain again
That his name was Karsikov,
But the village slowly emptied out,
They thought that he’d said, ‘*******!’

David Lewis Paget