When Mohammed Came to the Mountain

Lyrics

[Verse 1] Could it really have been beyond reason Calculated without regret? This shattering of all proportions convinced us of what Was the yawning, lazy blue of the sky complicit? Were birds caught off guard? Where were the birds When sudden renegade moments With an appetite for lives Cut loose from time And tore the hour open With a precision beyond comprehension? [Verse 2] The solid structure of the morning swayed And then became a waterfall of artifacts Cascading down through the air Lunchtime apples Neckties, bought haphazardly But given with great affection on Father's Days and Christmas Eves Watches and clocks emptying themselves of lost time As fast as they could A spider who toiled his life away unnoticed Inside the leaves of a camellia plant on the window sill Many final words And the last rags of breath Dozens and dozens of broken eggs from the cafeteria Ideas extinguished in mid-thought Half-baked birthday cakes Tomorrows still and sleeping Small as caterpillars on the under-leaves of time A scrap of dark blue, Chinese silk From a stylishly sexy blouse Who shall kiss that torn breast now? Skirts pulled up and up and up [Verse 3] Even the air seemed to be falling Strangers dropping down through the darkness Suddenly flung together and married Nothing in between themselves Weddings performed in all directions You cannot separate yourself from such moments An incredible descending Unbuttoned and plummeting Skulls slammed open and shut Open and shut [Verse 4] Did starfish emerge From the ruptured socket of the sea And swim up river To bear witness To the remains of names? Naked and divided from bodies Piling up on the air The morning decomposed quickly Devoured by some terrible awakening And by its own uselessness [Verse 5] All this hysterical information Swept over Indecent Gawking And wounded logic Details hidden in the bellies of snakes Burst forth With inhuman surprise The uninhibited imagination of death's pigs Suckled at the living With a wretched awkward skill In the forsaken belly of the world Had some other, more horrible virgin birth occurred? Or did the snake just fuck Eve again Because the gods of men were hungry for vengeance And another little snack? [Verse 6] Fragments of meaning falter In the anarchy of such dreams The wine where oysters once suckled and grew fat Beneath the stairways of harbor seals Still laps at the tip of Manhattan Yet so many things are lost In the tangled, threadbare latitudes of history [Verse 7] In dense silence Washed over by oblivion The soul wears a thousand years lightly As she undresses her dead And places them in arms Where centuries have no idea Of that obscene nothingness Hanging now over the ruins [Verse 8] You keep watching the sky But you stop looking so furiously at the emptiness The infinite, indifferent blue has filled it And yet has not filled it Because the emptiness ignores it The truth is unmiraculous here It killed a summer dress [Verse 9] You live with this strangeness In a furnace of melting metals Innocent as a teapot Worlds evaporated Two corners bound by water One by light and mortal odor And one by the mournful auger Falling over the city now Of what all this becomes next Only winter Arranging the snow And the exhausted and separate moon Ask nothing from your heart...