Drunken Boat

The wind was whipping shingle through the windows in the town A hail of stones across the roof, the slates came raining down A blade of light upon the spit came sweeping through the roar With me head inside a barrel and me leg screwed in the floor Mother, pack me bags because I'm off to foreign parts Don't ask me where I'm going 'cause I'm sure it's off the charts I'll pin your likeness on the wall right buy my sleeping head I'll send you cards and letters so you'll know that I'm not dead By this time in a week I should be far away from home Trailing fingers through the phosphor, or asleep in flowers of foam From Macao to Acapulco, from Havana to Seville We'll see monoliths and bridges and the Christ up on the hill An aria with the Russians at the piano in the bar With ice-floes through the window, we raised glasses to the Czar We squared off on a dockside with a couple a hundred Finns We dallied in the Dilly and we stoaked ourselves in gin Now the only deck that I'd want to walk Are the stalks of corn beneath my feet And the only sea I want to sail Is the darkened pond in the scented dusk Where a kid crouched full of sadness Lets his boat go drifting out into the evening Sun We sailed through constellations and were rutted by the storm I crumpled under cudgel blows and finally came ashore I spent the next two years or more just staring at the wall We went to sea to see the world, what do you think we saw? If we turned the table upside down and sailed around the bed Clamped knives between our teeth and tied bandannas 'round our heads With the wainscot our horizon and the ceiling as the sky You'd not expect that anyone would go and fucking die Now the only deck that I'd want to walk Are the stalks of corn beneath my feet And the only sea I want to sail Is the darkened pond in the scented dusk Where a kid crouched full of sadness Lets his boat go drifting out into the evening Sun At nights we passed the bottle 'round and drank to our lost friends We lay alone upon our bunks and prayed that this would end A wall of moving shadows with rows of swinging keys We dreamed that whole Leviathans lay rotting in their weeds There's a sound that comes from miles away, if you lean your head to hear A ship's bell rings on board a wreck when the air is still and clear And up above that means another angel's got his wings But all below it signifies is a ship's gone in the drink Now the only deck that I'd want to walk Are the stalks of corn beneath my feet And the only sea I want to sail Is the darkened pond in the scented dusk Where a kid crouched full of sadness Lets his boat go drifting out into the evening Sun