This is the progress of love that I feared:
You retreated just as my defeat finally neared,
When it’s only to lose myself I volunteered,
So all of your spoils would be mine—
Life takes its root in the deepest dark ground,
Where bones, blood and honor have been trampled down,
And beaten like ponies and driven to town
Where reason is traded for rhyme.
(Chorus)
Your sailor is my lawyer,
Your seamstress suits my king,
But you are the mouth of the river
At the start of my every dream
Some young punk cut a wire, the sun fell in the yard,
We gathered ‘round it and we kicked it hard,
We passed around flowers and wine and we cried, “Oh lord,
Now here comes the night—!”
Our every word now is a talking blues,
A hymn to the life we are all bound to lose;
We’d die for more, but we still refuse
To live without a fight
We say, “never forget,” and mean, “never forgive”
No, never as long as ever we live,
It offends our dead to surrender all this,
To even think we might go on—
And freedom’s doesn’t need to be free when it sells
Like ocean waves offered from inside of shells;
We bet the farm trying to ring its bells,
While love still goes for a song