Do you remember when the door slid open, and the sunlight poured in?
And there was time yet to cover your skin?
Before this lazy race toward greater self-destruction
Proxy-funeral pyres for all the fallen scooters, piled nineteen miles high
Pedal taverns in the sky! Drunken sirens' swan song
Holding court with golden hoses pumping fireball indulgences
The God of Gore in all his glory tried to slow it down
Rode his lion into town, till the Hartford circus folded
And the acoustic zoo was closed, so Mercer's hill was shown
To be built atop the bones of electric ponies made of plastic
And a thing known in Richmond as Poor Man's Petroleum
Your mood organ in the corner hums, just buzzing and patrolling them
All your primal and primarily sanctimonious emotions
Which leave you only bloated, floating hopeless in an ocean
Of humdrum hypnosis
Can't say it to no one plain, or they'll wash you down the drain
Like Carrie Buck into her prison
I'll never be who you want me to be
I'll never be who you are
I dream of Lillian Leitzel's screams, cryin' out from 'neath the beam
Send word to poor Codona: there's been another Fall of Rome, and
I paint my eyes wide shut, I see the big top which raised me
But only when I sleep, like the monkey beetle on a daisy
Pop a dose in Cappadocia, in a quarrel with Ezra Pound
Whose fascist ghost comes crawlin' when I land in London Town
Is anybody listening?
This disconnect is crippling!
On my boyhood bedroom wall there hung a poem by Rudyard Kipling
If you give a mouse your cookies, it'll follow you around
Big Brother's always watching, from his desk in Palo Alto
So it all goes up in flames
And the hidden Terms and Conditions state the dawn of an Age Ablaze
How I wish my god were gilded, how I lean on dear old Twain!
How I sing the body electric, in my pleasure and in my pain!
What a twisted sort of shame, to play their sordid game
In which even the great Bucephalus has egg on his long face
I'll never be who you want me to be
I'll never be who you are
I awoke to a snow globe cracked like pink watermelon brains
My cheeks slick with saline from a dream of darker days
Visions of bodies bent on sidewalks, by the Arch of my youth
Where I heard the shriek of angels and I saw the hellhounds loose
146 candles snuffed by treacherous winds
The hands of greed which locked the doors and sealed the poor girls in
Their temples violated violently, as they leapt unto the spikes
In the throes of this sick spectacle I cried into the night:
"O cruel Fortuna, take me instead of them!"
"Split your earth and spit them out, so they can breathe again!"
I swear I never feel so old as when I'm with my little sister's friends
Then again, it must be strange to be born with Pop-Tarts for hands
They hired me to be Pied Piper, but promptly fired me when
I said the only song I could play was "Lady Franklin's Lament"
The kids kicked me to the curb, threatened to cancel me and said
"If you want a gig, man, don't come back till you can sing us Cardi B or Lil Xan"
But I'll never be who you want me to be
I'll never be who you are