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