Visions of Johanna

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks
When you're trying to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded 'though
We're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain
Tempting you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna
That conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies
Play blindman's bluff with a key chain
And the all-night girls
They whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We keep hearing the night watchman
Click his flashlight on and off and ask
Himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of electricity
Howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna
Have now taken my place

Inside the museums
Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation
Must be like after a while
But even Mona Lisa
Must've had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
We see the primitive wallflower freeze
Where the jelly-faced women all sneeze
I hear the one with the mustache say
"Jeez, I can't find my knees."
But jewels and binoculars
Hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna
They make it all seem so cruel

The peddler now speaks
To the countess who's pretending to care for him
Saying, "Name me someone that's not a parasite
And I'll go out and say a prayer for him."
But like Louise always says
"You can't look at much, can 'ya man?"
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where the cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler he now steps to the road
He write everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
All, all...