Cut off my little finger with her silverware.
Sold my blood to the butcher..now
Her momma stares at my scars
Like tears float in the reservior.
Out where the scarecrows fast.
And the fattened calf learns to starve.

They chopped Tiller's head
And sawed off his hands.
Sent him off to the Promised Land.
Is there a sane way Out
Twixt Fire and Flower?
We poke through the rubble of dead dreams
That litter the floors of The Shadow Tower.

Puppeteer pull my old strings,
Make them sing in the air.
There's old buzzards riding screams
Through holes cut in the stairs.
Even the honest men'll turn on you
Amidst the fallfog and showers.
I've seen some strange things
Down in the dark halls
Of The Shadow Tower.

Shackled in closets, hunched hind old screens,
Men spraying sperm on old magazines.
Like slave ships listing gently out to sea.
Yes, the old lighthouse has been gutted,
But The Shadow Tower looms ominously.

Sally crushed my soft lies and nickle tears.
Now I wash her feat with my dirty hair.
I've heard some pained melodies
Pulled from the Fire and Flower.
Come read our Suicide Notes
and Love Letters
written on the walls
of the Shadow Tower.

I was locked down in the Looney Ward
In '93. Wailing with the madmen
In a chorus of screams.  Naked.
Prowling the rubber rooms in only sheets.
We're just ghousts trueing an iron wheel
Against the trunk of a Judas Tree.

Meaning's conversify* at their battered ends.
Trying to factor the paradox's hexed content,
As the ThreePennyOpera clangs and...
grinds out the hour.
and me and my brothers set fire
to the walls and crooked gates
of The Shadow Tower.

(*neologism)