Tortoises All The Way Down

Watchmen with their eyes closed

Ransom and a scripture by the picture of your face

Messages the rhymes chose

Blueprint for contrition in a cigarette case

Everybody knows, son

Everybody knows what you've done

Everybody knows, son

Everybody knows exactly what you’ve done

Charles was alive then

Towering like a mountain at the silver trumpet blast

William still alive till when

Our altars are all emptied of his offerings to the last

Everybody knows, son

Everybody knows just what you've done

Everybody knows, son

And so again it goes you can't end what you've begun

Surely as the Sun

Early on the east side comes

Before my sleepless eyes

Your features metamorphize

Surely as the Sun

Early on the east side comes

If only you had known

How soon you'd be on your own

How suddenly they'd cast the stone

When the mouths of praise and blame start to sound the same

And you’ve asked they please not come back around

And yet they happen by, you can offer my reply

There's tortoises all the way down

Since the night you came

Dressed up in your righteous name

All you claim to see

Doesn’t mean a thing to me

Surely as the Sun

Early on the east side comes

I know I'm not the only one

Whose blindfold and a scale ship refused to sail

And yet failed since each search for solid ground

You sing to me at night as the moving finger writes

On tortoises all the way down

You think that glass of wine could cancel half a line?

But it won’t wash our words out this time

And I'm not the only one who’s got nowhere to run

'Cause everybody knows, son

Everybody knows just what you’ve done

Everybody knows, son

Everybody knows what you’ve done

While all hiding inside our painting of a house

Hung up inside that same painted house

Which ever implies another painted house inside lives

Serpent in the sky lives

Servants of the least high

Most tortoiseless lives

Would you meet me sometime soon, son

Down by the riverside?

There's room enough in my paradise

My empty little mind