Week 60: The Future

To be without a home

Give me a snare roll or a nice organ line. Give me once upon a time you dressed real fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? Now, give me back my broken night, but you know you only used to get juiced in it. My mirrored room, my secret life, you shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you. It's lonely here, there's no one left to torture. You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat. Give me absolute control over every living soul, and lie beside me, baby, that's an order!

Give me crack and anal sex, ain’t it hard when you discover that he really wasn’t were it’s at? Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture. But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe. Give me back the Berlin wall, and Napoleon in rags and the language that he used. Give me Stalin and St Paul after he took from you everything he could steal. I've seen the future, brother: it is murder.

When they all come down and did tricks for you, exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions. You said you’d never compromise with the mystery tramp. Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore. But now you realize he's not selling any alibis. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul. Now you don’t talk so loud. When they said repent, repent I wonder what they meant. Now you don’t seem so proud about having to be scrounging for your next meal.

With no direction home you don't know me from the wind, you never will, you never did. You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely. I was the little Jew who wrote the Bible. I've seen the nations rise and fall. And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street. I've heard their stories, heard them all, but love's the only engine of survival. How does it feel to be on your own?

Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further. And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it. And now the wheels of heaven stop as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes you feel the devil's riding crop. Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse. Get ready for the future: it is murder.

You used to laugh about, everybody that was hanging out. There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose and your private life will suddenly explode. You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. There'll be phantoms, there'll be fires on the road, and a white man dancing. You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns. You'll see a woman hanging upside down her features covered by her fallen gown. People'd call and say, Beware doll, you're bound to fall. You thought they were all kiddin' you. And all the lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson, they're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made. And the white man dancin'. You used to be so amused. Ask him, do you want to make a deal?

You never understood that it ain’t no good. Give me back the Berlin wall, give me Stalin and St Paul, princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, give me Christ or give me Hiroshima. Destroy another fetus now we don't like children anyhow, I've seen the future, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone and baby: it is murder.

Happy Holidays.