Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded though we all do our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain tempting you to defy it.
Lights flicker from the opposite loft,
In this room the heat-pipes just cough,
The country music station plays soft,
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off,
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key-chain
And the all-night girls, they whisper of escapades out on the D train,
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight, ask himself if it's him or them who should be insane.
But Louise, she's alright, she's just near,
She's delicate, she seems like the mirror,
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here.
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.
Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously,
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously,
And, when bringing her name up, he speaks of her farewell kiss to me.
He's sure got a lot of gall
To be so useless and all,
Muttering small talk at the wall
While I'm in the hall.
Oh, how can I explain? It's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they've kept me up past the dawn.
Inside the museums infinity's going up on trial,
Voices echo, "This is what salvation must be like after a while",
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles.
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze,
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeez,
I can't find my knees."
Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule,
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.
The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him,
Saying, "Name me somebody that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him."
But, like Louise always says, "You can't look at much, can you, man?" as she herself prepares for him.
And Madonna, she still has not showed,
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed,
The fiddler, he now steps to the road,
He writes, "Everything's been returned which was owed"
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes.
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.