Ain't it just like the night to play tricks
|
when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
|
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it.
|
And Louise holds a handful of rain temptin' you to defy it.
|
Lights flicker from the opposite loft.
|
In this room the heat pipes just cough.
|
The country music station plays soft,
|
But there's nothing, really nothing, to turn off.
|
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
|
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.
|
|
In the empty lot where the ladies play
|
blindman's bluff with the key chain,
|
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train.
|
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight,
|
ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane.
|
But Louise she's all right, she's just near,
|
She's delicate and seems like the mirror,
|
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
|
That Johanna's not here.
|
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face.
|
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.
|
|
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously.
|
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously,
|
And when bringing her name up he speaks of her farewell kiss to me.
|
He's sure got a lot of gall to be so useless and all,
|
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall.
|
Oh, how can I explain? It's so hard to get on
|
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn.
|
|
Inside the museums Infinity goes up on trial
|
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while.
|
But even Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues,
|
you can tell by the way she smiles
|
See the primitive wallflower freeze.
|
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze,
|
Hear the one with the mustache say "Jeeze, I can't find my knees."
|
Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule,
|
But these visions of Johanna they make it all seem so cruel.
|
|
The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him.
|
Saying "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out
|
and say a prayer for him."
|
But like Louise always says "Ya can't look at much can ya man?"
|
As she, herself, prepares for him
|
And Madonna she still has not showed,
|
We see this empty cage now corrode,
|
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed,
|
The fiddler, he now steps to the road,
|
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
|
On the back of the fish truck that loads
|
While my conscience explodes.
|
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
|
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.
|
|
-----------------
|
Visions of Johanna
|
| Grateful Dead |
