We owe a rooster to Asclepius
When the time comes don’t forget, please pay
When they come to lay the coins across my eyes
There’ll be no one left to watch what I say

From my lonely bedroom spire
I can see the smoke from fires
Lit from pages of my book of days
Stretching out past Riker’s Island
Fingers reaching for the sky and
Blanketing the sun with haze

Do what you will, you libertine
The law of man will find its way
In stripes and bars or in quicklime laid
The silence finds you either way

So you summon elementals
In your bedroom, in your temple
New fires for the space between the sheets
Beasts you bore in wild abandon
Secret words of love and passion
A new bible for two hearts unleashed

But those sad words
Of tongue and pen
Erased and changed
Then changed again
The pages frayed
The marriage spent
But Babalon
Will rise again

Little Egypt in a see through shirt
Blowing kisses to the men in back
Little Brooklyn on the workhouse floor
Stripped naked showing welts all down her back

From the jury box they listened
To the same words they’d imprisoned
In a jail made of paper leaves and glue
Tearing down the bonds of wedlock
Giving her the choice of hemlock
Or chains that she could not break through

Do what you will, you libertine
The law of man will find its way
In stripes and bars or in quicklime laid
The silence finds you either way
The silence finds you either way

In the air the angels hover
Whisper names of spirit lovers
That wait just on the other side
Bonds of pleasure, not creation
Words of love and liberation
For the phantom and his silent bride

But those sad words
Of tongue and pen
Erased and changed
Then changed again
The pages frayed
The marriage spent
But Babalon
Will rise again

We owe a rooster to Asclepius
When the time comes don’t forget, please pay
Blood draining down from his beak to the altar
Where the record of my last words lay

In the body sung electric
A new truthful dialectic
There’s no bars across the golden doors
No stitches running down the hemline
Where our lips and songs are untied
I can’t tell if they are mine or yours

But those sad words
Of tongue and pen
Erased and changed
Then changed again
The pages frayed
The marriage spent
Let’s never say
What might have been