When we got back to the island With its pinched and brown faces We felt so ill at ease We scratched, kept our eyes low and we quarrelled By day the flies came and by night the mosquitoes As angry as I and I became dazed The light was so hard and the liquor was hazy Why we ever came back here man I wont never know What does quarantine mean when you cant get home? And why do I ask you when I know that you do not know? Then in May the news came and we were on our own My friends left on the sly Their boat rocked slow and lazy While me and the rent dreamt of getting paid But when we left we werent feeling all that bad We parted company on a beach where it rolled All silver and blonde like the lid of an eye That wont ever close rested over waters this tireless And if the sun is a demon, let a demon be white Let the days sink like its footprints under needles of light In the bars on the island Men have hands like mine And stomachs about as dead as fishes eyes On the streets all the women hide behind their fly screens You cant make out their faces And they know you cant see Theres a graveyard thats waiting just outside of time And a church house to flesh out the skeleton of your mind The church walls breed shadows where the children bare feet Watch the vines spill from everywhere out into the heat All knuckled and gnarled like a bad memory With their tropical flowers like a shriek in your ear Like her shrieks in your ear This steeple of wood Above which the jungle looms patient Were fucked now And were fucked for keeps Oh Lord grant me one more deciduous season Then grant me a winter like so many tears
shriek, like, grant, island, church