Special Rider – First Song

It was you who brought this trouble
with the way your right hand lead;
you could have had a quiet life
but for the burning in your head.

I saw you on the mountain,
I saw you coming down -
rolling like an avalanche
onto a helpless town.

I stood there like an idiot
with a steel bit in my mouth,
the sky blackened by every bird
moving south.

Down on the waterfront
there is a ship of fools
delivering a shapeless mass
and a bag of tools.

It sailed in on a Tuesday
it was raining on the docks
that was the day that crazy Murphy escaped
by chewing through his locks.

A noble dog had lost its head
and bit its master’s hand
who leapt back and struck the hourglass
spilling out the sand.

It’s not time to look back on fields
of burnt-up aching clay -
they’ll get you in a second
if they see you turned that way.

You wandered through the meadows
I had known as a child.
The wind caught your flowing hair
and your eyes were burning wild.

I don’t remember where it was
you finally left me behind,
maybe down by the old canal
where the swans made a rag out of my mind

To clean up this awful mess
of sticks and mud and tar
and the black streaks on the window
that cover up my lucky star.

The ship of fools sailed away
but left the fools behind.
They married with the sick and weak,
the lovelorn and the blind.

Their children were all sorcerers
and alchemists of gold
from the steam of their cooking
you learned the stories that you told -

The stories that you told to me
in the breaking dawn,
the ones that made me love you
and that keep me driving on.

They dragged your body through the streets -
fingers in your golden hair.
Swing low, sweet blade!
leave no one standing here.

I know it’s not the first time
and that you’ve been dead before -
blinded by transfiguration
shifting at your core.

If feel your spirit with me now
like a blood-light in my brains,
no electricity or sunlight
along these darkened plains.

But there’s a golden city in the distance
and there’s curses on my tongue -
before you there were other worlds
and now there’s only one.