Death Of A Ladies’ Man

Ah the man she wanted all her life was hanging by a thread

“I never even knew how much I wanted you,” she said.

His muscles they were numbered and his style was obsolete.

“O baby, I have come too late.” She knelt beside his feet.

“I’ll never see a face like yours in years of men to come

I’ll never see such arms again in wrestling or in love.”

And all his virtues burning in the smoky Holocaust

She took unto herself most everything her lover lost

Now the master of this landscape he was standing at the view

with a sparrow of St. Francis that he was preaching to

She beckoned to the sentry of his high religious mood

She said, “I’ll make a place between my legs,

I’ll show you solitude.”

He offered her an orgy in a many mirrored room

He promised her protection for the issue of her womb

She moved her body hard against a sharpened metal spoon

She stopped the bloody rituals of passage to the moon

She took his much admired oriental frame of mind

and the heart-of-darkness alibi his money hides behind

She took his blonde madonna and his monastery wine --

“This mental space is occupied and everything is mine.”

He tried to make a final stand beside the railway track

She said, “The art of longing’s over and it’s never coming back.”

She took his tavern parliament, his cap, his cocky dance,

she mocked his female fashions and his working-class moustache.

The last time that I saw him he was trying hard to get

a woman’s education but he’s not a woman yet

And the last time that I saw her she was living with some boy

who gives her soul an empty room and gives her body joy.

So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed

it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed

It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star

I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star

I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star

I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

A bleak and somewhat ungallant song, it was recorded in chaotic circumstances and included on the album of the same name (1977).