Mountains come and mountains go but a love like ours will surely show the stars themselves to be a fling I’ve seen the End of Time It’s no big thing
The ocean deep is just a pond
I throw my coat for you to walk upon
The waves are tears that mist my eyes
The mighty wind is
just your sleepy sigh
When I sing to you the angels sing along
and yet I know theres something wrong
The sky above is in your eyes
and I know that means
you’re lying on the ground
The sirens freeze my blood is cold
suddenly the world’s just too damn old
the future fading in your eyes
time and space collapse
in one last sigh
Mountains come and mountains go but a love like ours will surely show the stars themselves to be a fling I’ve seen the End of Time It’s no big thing
On Sundays, very early, you could sit in a certain spot in my old backyard, with a leafy canopy above you and the vine covered garage and overgrown yard before you, with the gentle sound of the little fountain* in the background and, for a little while, forget you were in the city. Kind of.
*Not the pond in the picture but the source of the background audio in the improvised guitar instrumental below.
It’s a truism oft-cited by motivational speakers and their ilk that walking is the process of falling forward with our weight on one foot and then suddenly shifting the other foot forward to catch ourselves… over and over. This is, of course, intended to show that there is no progress without risk, no movement without somehow defying gravity, if only momentarily.
Whatever.
At a certain point you get somewhere, even if the somewhere is right back around where you started from… but you’re wiser for the journey. Yeah… sure. Wiser and back on square one… having passed Go, having spent the 200 dollars you collected and maybe some rent from that place on Park Avenue you lucked into and then lost to the bank.
I wrote this song before I’d passed Go the first of many times… but I could see the shape of things and I kept looking for an out. The fairy tale option, maybe. The magic piece that would make the puzzle something you could hang on the wall and then somehow enjoy in contented satisfaction. There were some that almost looked like they might fit… but in the end, the jigsaw puzzle ended up scattered…
I knew it would never end up looking like the picture on the box…
In the course of events
I’ve seen my goals hanging just like a carrot in front of my nose
In the struggle for those higher attainments, hell,
I’ve been to the top
and I’ve seen the drop on the other side
And I don’t care if your money’s no good
I don’t care if both your legs are wood
I don’t care what your ma says to do
Just come away with me
It takes time to get where you want to go
and its never quite the same when you get there
but that doesn’t stop me cause there’s still a couple things
I’d like to try with you and you never can tell
it might work out all right
You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me
I’ve been burned before
and I’ll get burned again
I guess that’s the same for everyone
I know what I need
I know what I want
I know what I get —
they don’t always correspond
You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me
But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of one little person don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Someday you’ll understand that.
Not now.
That’s what I told my cat when I sat her down to finally spill those very same beans on the global warming situation.
Sweetheart, I told her, the world has always been ending… the gravity pulling us toward the edge of the abyss is sometimes the only thing keeping us moving forward… but I know you’re worried about the polar bears. And I am too.
It may be too late for them and it’s always too late for us…
But we’ve got each other.
And we’ll always have that…in the cosmic sense, anyhow.
It’s just one trainwreck after another
it’s just one disaster followin’ the t’other
It’s a wonder I can get back on my feet
to fall again
Some catastrophe
Some calamity
more adversity
more insanity
it’s the way it goes in the world
of mice and men
Cataclysm and devastation
tragedy and desolation
yet I know it’s the way it goes
my friend
double debacles and treble trouble*
cauldron of misfortune set to boil and bubble
I’ve seen the future it’s
more of the same to the end
Waterloo was just a hiccup
Little Big Horn just all a big mixup
When everything is ashes
maybe we can all be friends
Suns explode and worlds collide
all us little specks along for the ride
the fabric of time and space
someday willl mend
Cataclysm and devastation…
Suns explode and worlds collide
all us little specks along for the ride
in the end it all — comes down to the end
2007-10-28 (C)2007, TK Major
*It came to my attention after writing this song that I, for my whole life, had been using the number three pronunciation of debacle. After that realization, every time I heard someone using the number one, soft a [ah] (or the never-heard-’round-these-parts second-preferred short a), it bugged me. Not least because if I changed my pronunciation, it would through the rhythm of the song off. I finally hit on changing the lyric and doubling up the cadence to the line above — double debacles and treble trouble — from the orginal debacles and double trouble.
