What Shutter Shipyards Should Have Said

In my crossroad travel book I found a distant land
Entangled in a field of corn, owned by the river hand
The captain corpses of the army marched along the streets
As heartbreak handsome heralds hopped upon the mayor's feet
Women built from portal posts and pathway ponder pasts
Were risen from the stellar sleighs and put upon the masts
So that the lighthouse cryptic duke could call a violet face
Upon the telephone he wore in the hope of fashion taste
For who could say what men in fear would do to Camelot
When cast upon the open rocks of haves and of have-nots

A lava-tongued aristocrat of the bold and bland brigade
Approached me with his man-at-arms and holding both grenades
Proceeded with his other arm that grew out from his chest
To steal my water and tell me that this was for the best
My empty canteen wishful thinking ceded simple sighs
As the railway worker men approached me from all sides
Telling me in velvet words that they had lost their jobs
Because of my own carelessness and my phony mobs
And as I tried to tell them I was not their wooly goat
They began to pour concrete into my open throat

The cackling history of faith and the hopeful hierophant
Expect me then to scrub their ears and hold their hollow chant
I asked them in my letters if they sought some form of trade
But life inside their decade minds was only a charade
So poised was I inside the halls of commerce to convince
The castle-creeks of cancelled freaks that I was their lost prince
That, in a haze of mist and maze, I told them a blue lie
About their center-village square and my silent silken tie
But as soon as they discovered that my top hat was a fake
I knew that even coming there had been my own mistake

The road away was humbling, not pleasant in the least
I soon became a servant boy, a peasant and a priest
So that I could evade the tiger-truth of pumpkin fists
That followed me to where I went and played my tragic lists
As though they were biography, a blemished banal bore
The carnival of all my dreams with clowns and clones and more
So maligned were these all these freaks I took a greasy pen
And drew faces on their empty heads and truth upon their skin
I promised then I would destroy that awful travel book
And never return to the place that God himself forsook