When your father's door closes
While you are on the path
And you stumble along
In the dirt and the grime
And you walk through a forest where you come to a stream
And you take off your clothes and you leave them behind
And your head is filled up with high times and revenge
And the spur of nobility
In the flank of the poor
And the cantankerous priests
At the temples of misery
The hideous whisper that comes out of the dark
And everything's wrong in the words of the world
And the heaven they promised you is made of blue tin
And the feeling you get in the face of the poor
And the hole in the floor is draining us down
And the rent in the sky is pulling us up
And the moon is so cold like the sun is so hot
And the leaves all come down and let winter approach
And winter rides up on a grim steed indeed
First the snow, then the ice
Then the blind seed
The wood at the end of the worlds
A hole in the earth, she wobbles in her orbit
You can't think straight, you're frazzled beyond all belief
You've been whipped and chained and dined and whined
You had all the drugs
Now you're succumbing
Now it's all pulling you down
No surrender for you, you fight right to the edge
Bound and beaten you stand, no remorseful
Hooded in deep shadow, like the afternoon itself
Evening coming
With no good in its heart
Evening on black crow wings
Descending to earth
What will crawl out of the hole
When darkness hammers down her curtain
What stupid monstrosity
Has fate dished up for you to scorn
You do your bad deeds and you gloat
Ignorance is bliss, thus you are euphoric
Some new punishment the elders have dreamed up
For you to endure
Some Nietzsche-like axiom
Or some ???? grime
Some nightmare
Caused by weeks without sleep
Some nightmare caused
By an intake of poisons
Some vision conjured from my burned out camera
Some photo developed in the darkest room
Yes, you're captured and this moment will last forever
You really are a sinful, evil person, you know?
You love to be cruel, you love to hurt and shock to the very core
Deep inside you, you're one thought that no one really existed
But you
And you thought you'd go on cheating at this life
And that the loaded dice you roll would never be discovered
A strange place to be
There can be no punishment for you that you would feel
You'll never wake up and just come good
You're a shape-shifting Loki who thrives on mischief and misery
You'll never have the balls to understand that like a real man
You'll never understand until the axe falls and hell calls
The thorns and cement
Which jabber in sibilant whispers
In a structure never completed
Abandoned in its very birth
Pitted with tiny punctures
Like Lenny's arm, yeah
And like the sky, negative
In a bad dream
I materialise here
In a sheer forest
Of marble concrete
Three, two, one, none
There's beauty in some forlorn places
But not here
Cold floor at my feet
The whitest thing is the rim of the blackest hole
I've travelled down that vortex and was spat out
Holy hole
The twisted tangled made off stolen
I sing the blues to the rubble
Maybe it can understand
The drips of paint ran down my days
Pooling on the ground
It's solvent when I woke up
I'm broken and broke
I'm crying black tears on my flesh skin
I win a little, I lose a lot
The Antarctic heartbeat coming through the dirt
A blackened shadow
Which darkens
In the sickly morning sun
You know, sometimes
Life is like a dirty weekend in a cheap hotel
You know you're gonna regret it when it's gone
When the time has been sucked out
And the situation is all tristesse and ????
When the sadness of the songs emanating from other rooms
Makes you stop and think
Yeah when you think of all the grief and the lies
How careful you gotta be covering your tracks
Because my man has already seen this in his mind
And your spouse gonna probably get the house
When you saw my tattoos, my lovely wings
Well that was a nasty laugh
And all the bastards on this earth can go to hell
And all that dark poetic stuff is just some freak's lust under another name
The stuff we took to get high burnt out my frame
I call it the Ken Burns
I call it vodka and cigarettes and your lovely jawline on my horizon
I call it from beyond and it comes in a sudden downpour
The rain on the roof, the clichéd mirrored neon
Like a dim red dwarf in the storm
The next day the storm has gone and taken him
In the cold light of an aching morning
In the damaged feeble sun muffled by the silent curtains
From a Gideon's Bible you had been reading me the Song of Solomon
You said I was Sheba, you said I was your Cleopatra
You said something else that tired me out and I thought that's stupid
When you kiss my back I was taken by apathy
Yeah, yeah you're okay I think
But not worth getting into trouble over
I wish I could type this all out for you
And send it in a telegram
Damn it
You're a babbling brook
And I'm gonna block you
Yes, my dear, they call this resolve
Yes, my friend, I've thought this all through
I can change my flight back east where I at least understand things
Joe is a good guy and he really loves me
He's just, he's just, he's just, he's just
It doesn't matter, I'll think it all through in the sky
What a joke this all is
I think they call this disenchantment
I'm gonna think of something interesting
A message or some little film over things
Yeah, I'm enjoying myself now
It'll be worth everything as I think of you squirming
And I won't be there to see it
Yeah, me and Joe, arm in arm
I'm far away in a future you will never see
Listening to the music you will never hear
Yeah, ha ha
Where was I?
Sigmund Freud looked out the window in a deep dark November
He was writing in his notebook
Ideas whirled around in his head
The snow swirled and the summer came
The birds of the sky returned
The fields were waving
And in the most fertile bloom
Madness is a blessing, he thought
As he scribbled incessantly
Everything was all mixed up
The whores and the sailors and the mothers and the sons
The hills and crescents and the message in a cloud
The thoughts of a woman as she falls asleep in summer
The hypnagogia bizarre as all hell
"What do you make of that, Herr Doktor?" she rudely asked
Freud thought about that bitch a bit too much, said his wife
Where did work end and dream begin?
On the farm boys?
They'd go out on Saturday nights to a visiting circus
If you had some money in your pocket, you might get lucky
It didn't make sense, none of it
Freud puffed on his pipe and scratched under his chin
He thought about the stockings and the barn
He thought about the inscrutable vision of the Orient
He thought about Rachel and the way she looked the last time he had seen her
No, it did not make sense
He hoped dinner would be served soon
The snow would come, he'd light another fire
And the memories would linger in the pale glass
And the memories would fade in the tall grass
[backmasked excerpts from the poem]
She wandered long and lonely down the corridor
But the hotel had become a prison
And the prison had become a forest
And the summer changed to an austere autumn
And the autumn had faded into a cruel, wretched winter
The saints and snakes on her skin writhed in agony
The butterfly over her ribs, oh baby, it's a wild world
A letter from a bank
"We're afraid we cannot give you any credit at this time"
The speed in her head was full throttle
Ideas higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter
Everything in unbearable crystal clarity
The nausea of existence
The horror of our constant wars
The Holocaust against all other creatures
The dumb dead leaves at her feet still sobbing
The nothingness of a promise
The drone of music in a graveyard at sunset
That never hurt like words
The sticks and the stones
That never hurt like words
I'll make you see how much I love you, I'll make you see how much I love you
In a drowned world
Her career in ruins
No more holidays
No more days of wine, women and the roses song
Song of Briar
Song of Thorn
Beauty on an earth where no one cares
Morning becomes abhorrent
Evening goes down the drain
Another idiot, another bed
Another regret to cling into
The brambles are wrapped around the iron, she says
It's a maze to be deciphered
But I already give up
I did this to myself
But it's everybody else's fault
I can never admit I'm wrong, I can never think I'm not right
I did my best to help everyone I knew
I say
I went out of my way
Now why has this happened to me?
Maybe once, maybe twice
Ungrateful minions
I should blast them all
But the iron does not flinch
And the air does not warm to her words
And the galaxy shudders through its mysterious orbit
In the dark, oblivious
[Backmasked version of The Hideous Whisper]