I found the garden gate unlocked so I went in
And picked the perfect spot where I could bury my youth
But hounds of love and hounds of war
Hounds galore
Those hoary hounds were pouncing
Each with waxy wooden tooths
Remember when it dawned on you
The day that you knew that
You could live forever and still never make a masterpiece
To shut those pups up in the least
But everybody knows
That's the way it goes
Even if you die on the ocean
Every Wednesday afternoon
Me and you bleeding on the newspaper classifieds
Dragging out the drinking down for high school kids who
Died out on the highway in the middle of the night
Sing a song that means you love
Everyone who's ever come within the sound
Of any of your cloudy words
But get your song together first
Save it 'til you're sure
Hang it on the door
Sing it from the top of the mountain
'Til everybody knows
Exactly how it goes
Even if you die on the ocean
Even when you die on the ocean
Children screaming speeches into microscopic tape recorders
Wired to the mire of the moat
And I was still at odds with several thousand nonbelievers
Both above and below
Smoking silhouettes outside the school with all the cymbalists
The simplest way I knew to go
And we could talk ourselves into the dreary deeps
Before we realized there was a hole in the boat
And everybody's answer to the world
Was "We should start another world!"
And I said, "What do you propose? Because you know
The world that we've got going now has to be
The hardest place I've ever been.
It's got me shrinking in my skin, but then again, I guess
That everybody knows
That's just the way it goes."
Even if you die on the ocean
There's just so many crowns
And everybody drowns
Everybody dies on the ocean.