(Even If You Die On The) Ocean

I found the garden gate unlocked so I went in

And picked the perfect spot where I could bury my youth

But hounds of love and hounds of war

Hounds galore

Those hoary hounds were pouncing

Each with waxy wooden tooths

Remember when it dawned on you

The day that you knew that

You could live forever and still never make a masterpiece

To shut those pups up in the least

But everybody knows

That's the way it goes

Even if you die on the ocean

Every Wednesday afternoon

Me and you bleeding on the newspaper classifieds

Dragging out the drinking down for high school kids who

Died out on the highway in the middle of the night

Sing a song that means you love

Everyone who's ever come within the sound

Of any of your cloudy words

But get your song together first

Save it 'til you're sure

Hang it on the door

Sing it from the top of the mountain

'Til everybody knows

Exactly how it goes

Even if you die on the ocean

Even when you die on the ocean

Children screaming speeches into microscopic tape recorders

Wired to the mire of the moat

And I was still at odds with several thousand nonbelievers

Both above and below

Smoking silhouettes outside the school with all the cymbalists

The simplest way I knew to go

And we could talk ourselves into the dreary deeps

Before we realized there was a hole in the boat

And everybody's answer to the world

Was "We should start another world!"

And I said, "What do you propose? Because you know

The world that we've got going now has to be

The hardest place I've ever been.

It's got me shrinking in my skin, but then again, I guess

That everybody knows

That's just the way it goes."

Even if you die on the ocean

There's just so many crowns

And everybody drowns

Everybody dies on the ocean.