Boogie Street

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,

I never thought we’d meet.

You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:

I’m back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,

And then it’s time to go

I tidied up the kitchenette;

I tuned the old banjo.

I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.

They’re saving me a seat.

I’m what I am, and what I am,

Is back on Boogie Street.

And O my love, I still recall

The pleasures that we knew;

The rivers and the waterfall,

Wherein I bathed with you.

Bewildered by your beauty there,

I’d kneel to dry your feet.

By such instructions you prepare

A man for Boogie Street.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One…

So come, my friends, be not afraid.

We are so lightly here.

It is in love that we are made;

In love we disappear.

Though all the maps of blood and flesh

Are posted on the door,

There’s no one who has told us yet

What Boogie Street is for.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,

I never thought we’d meet.

You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:

I’m back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,

And then it’s time to go…

Co-written by Sharon Robinson, this song was included on Ten New Songs (2001). The real Boogie Street is Bugis Street in Singapore, by day a mainstream commercial and retail area but by night the centre of the transgender sex bazaar culture. The metaphorical Boogie Street Cohen has described as a “street of work and desire, the ordinary life and also the place we live in most of the time that is relieved by the embrace of your children, or the kiss of your beloved, or the peak experience in which you yourself are dissolved … We all hope for those heavenly moments, which we get in those embraces and those sudden perceptions of beauty and sensations of pleasure, but we’re immediately returned to Boogie Street”.