It's always the same with debutantes running
for the two way mirror for the purchased vision
of all those sexy things of what they think is other,
first they read it then they need it then they
find the friend they steal the key they kiss and please,
they pluck the needle thoughts without touching a vein,
they come into my home and rustle through my papers,
they ride the night and call it holy and tell their sisters
with a romantic hush that they've really experienced the real.
Well junkies lie and alcoholics lie and thrill seekers lie,
and in those so called confessional rooms what
they feed on is the pain, the remembrance of rushes past,
and yeah, we need to spill our guts, we need to paint
in the bloody word colors of Goya and Carvaggio,
and we create our lives in the stories we tell,
and we pray and we cry and we dream and we try
and when we run out of horrors we find ourselves,
we find we can cut the cords to the past,
but what the debutantes never know, what they never
can put their polished fingers on is that we have
cuddled together through the long night with death and suicide,
is that the reason we are in those rooms is that
life ran out of options and that life ran out of visions,
and when we finished ruining our own lives
we started on our lovers, on our friends and on our families,
we drag them all down into the pretty hell of Rimbaud
and Francis Thompson with the hounds and the fires,
with the bullets and the knives, with the solid truth
that this life is filled with beauty and we just finished off
the last morsels of promise, and by doing so we had to change,
we had to confess and drag our withered bodies
across the shattered glass of all those broken memories,
and then, yeah, then and then and then and only then then
after the all curious ways of all of us god hungry fallen angels
are we able to sit together and look wet eyed into each
others hearts, and in those hearts see the great beauty
of another life saved, of another hunter who came home
from the desert and has a story they have to tell.
I guess it's ok for the voyeurs to enter,
but I wonder why they won't taste the poppies, why they
won't take the risk in the tower with the bats and the doves,
and I get a little angry at the cocktail conversations
of their trips into the slums and of the artists they have known.
Do they understand why we stand up in those rooms
and say My Name IS....do they catch the truth of the verb,
that glorious verb TO BE, is, are, am, do they know?
We stand up and speak because we have to,
because we gotta confirm we've been there and back,
and we are alive, and we are not dead, and every day
there's that thought in our head of what it would be like
to go back into the lands of opium and ale,
and we have to remember that it's not just us,
that it's our loves we have killed.
We stand up and we speak because god and living love
comand that we do so and do it clean.
