From A Balance Beam

(album: Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground - 2002)

There is a man holding a megaphone, so he must have been the voice of God.
The bystanders claimed they saw angels flying up and down the block.
Well, they must have been attached to wires. I saw one laying in the lawn with a broken arm,
so I called 911. So that is one less founded opinion. One more cause for a dispute.
So the street filled, like a basin, up with cameras and their crews
and they washed away the rumors leaving just the concrete truth. It was a spectacle.
No, I mean a miracle. So then I fell like that girl from a balance beam.
A gymnasium of eyes were all holding on to me. I lifted one foot to cross the other
and I felt myself slipping. It was a small mistake. Sometimes that is all it takes.
Now I'm staring at my wrist, hoping that the timing is right. When the planets will align.
There will be no planets to align. Just the carcass of the sun
and those little painted marbles spinning senseless through an endless black sky.
(and so it never started and it will never stop just like I am and you are)
It was in a foreign hotel's bathtub I baptized myself in change.
And one by one I drowned all of the people I had been.
I emerged to find the parallels were fewer. I was cleansed. I looked in the mirror
and someone new was there. Still, I was as helpless as a chess piece
when I was lifted up by someone's hand and delivered from the corner my enemies had got me in.
But in all of my salvation I still felt imprisoned inside that holding cell that is myself.
So I wait for the day when I'll hear the key as it turns in the lock
and the guard will say to me, "Oh my patient prisoner you have waited for this day
and finally you are free! You are free! You are freezing."
Now I'm staring at the sun, waiting for it to explode. Because a day is gonna come,
don't know when but it will come and then we will finally know the way out of here.
And I will throw away this wrinkled map and my chart of stars and compass, cracked.
And I'll climb out that tree all wet with sap to avoid the hungry beasts below.
I'll cut out my lover's tongue and sing of a graveyard gray and a garden green
and we won't have to worry no more. No we won't have to wonder again about
how this song or story ends about how this song and story will end.