Bathwater

I am not a poor boy
And my story's seldom interesting
I settled in the city
Where I found the light most flattering
I didn't care to own
So I became the greatest lessor
And marched right through the first door
Marked a safe place for transgressors
There is panic in the provinces
And some say we provoked it
And some say we should be proud of it
We bought it and we broke it
And we left those lawns so long ago
We hardly can remember
How we built a new tomorrow
Just by moving each September
You say "I have no father"
And you know you have no daughter
There's no telling what we'd do
If we loved babies half as much as bathwater
In the temple of the senses
Where attraction and revulsion
Are the only shared experience
Compulsory compulsions
Will replace the search for beauty now
If not the starlet's striving
They can paint you on a bus
But they won't ever catch you driving one
The most committed amateurs
The noblest of the savages
Live free from the achievers
Here sequestered from war's ravages
Some of them may practice
On the scales to better break them
But the form requires contentment
Revolutionaries make the rules
And some of them may practice
But I found not one believer
You know there is no God
But when I tell you there's no Caesar, you just laugh
I still love your laugh
Others left to languish
In the shadow of dead languages
Can visualize a savior
Who will vanish as he vanquishes
We have no such illusions
We welcome visibility
And cherish the confusion
With the decadent nobility
The romance of the pioneer
The builder or the squatter
In terror of the middle
We collected their bathwater
Till it formed mighty ocean
We'll forever swim around in
Such a thrill to be here frolicking
On waves we might have drowned in
Our leaderless collective
Has emboldened all it banishes
And left you with a leader
Who will vanquish as he vanishes into
The bathwater's tranquil gray-blue