The Jungle Line

Rousseau walks on trumpet paths Safaris to the heart of all that jazz Through i bars and girders-through wires and pipes The mathematic circuits of the modern nights Through huts, through harlem, through jails and gospel pews Through the class on park and the trash on vine Through europe and the deep deep heart of dixie blue Through savage progress cuts the jungle line In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear Those cannibals-of shuck and jive They'll eat a working girl like her alive With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band He hangs it up above the jungle line The jungle line, the jungle line Screaming in a ritual of sound and time Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke Coy and bitchy, wild and fine And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats Charging, chanting down the jungle line There's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb There's a poppy snake in a dressing room Poppy poison-poppy tourniquet It slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit And metal skin and ivory birds Go steaming up to rousseau's vines They go steaming up to brooklyn bridge Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line