Clickety clack and fuckabout laze around and gadabout black and white evil and sin each time I cough within the fist grips tighter squeezing like a freshly killed bird warm and limp in yr hand blood like lipstick on it's needle beak and papa tells me to strangle it because it ain't quite dead yet. I didn't mind shooting it but killing it was a different thing. Nobody told me about the way they look you straight in the eye and tremble a bit just as they die and I think I'll switch to catching butterflies with a tire iron and if anybody asks me I'll say just exactly what I said to you O so many times and O so many years ago when rivers were still known to freely flow and the germans hadn't invented the U-boat and gasoline was still 10 cents a gallon and cops didn't have radios and man didn't have sattellites and nobody had any civil rights but you could still rob a bank easily enough and the music wasn't all about powder fluff and phone calls cost a nickel and no charge at all sir for your next refill unless you're drinking turpentine or thunderbird wine not a terrible amount of difference in my mind and remember when not so long ago you could still hear Bob Dylan on the radio and some russian guy took off his shoe and threatened to bury you and the concrete market goin helter skelter cause everybody and their mother wanted a fallout shelter and golf courses and mine fields and churches where a widow kneels and prays for better bread and better days and babies that ain't so poorly fed.
And the rain keeps drippin and space keeps slippin and there ain't no steady rhythm to the soldiers marching down every street in my head flying lead burning dead red mud over spilled blood where every winner gets a ticket and we don't have any workers to picket with cardboard signs and minds empty of everything but fear and who will water the flowers next who will translate from soul to text who will break the windows who will cut the cane who will mend the fences who will start the fires who will build the bombs and who will they be dropped upon who will sing the next mournful song and who will it be sung for and who's children will cry who's animals will starve who will have the next heart and who will keep it warm. The sun shines it's frozen lines thru my window and next to me a body does stir and breathe and talk in sleep with words I can't understand making motions with his hands talking to dead people who built the church steeple in a town in a land I might never see because this goddamn paper is killing me and I'm told there's nothing left to see but blind men tell me different and life does have it's accidents but this ain't one of them you see my friend this was all meant to be I've seen this circle in a dream before looks the same as the puddle on my kitchen floor and ten thousand men all wrote the same song for me to hear but I never can see or tell exactly how the last one fell was it heat stroke or black lung was it old age or machine gun was it fire was it flood was it plague was it famine or was it maybe just a policeman standing in the doorway to the halls of justice and the closest you ever came to the judge was the business end of a billy club and broken glass and screaming and blood and the whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.The whole world is watching.
