Bottle Baby

Your issue may walk among fine moral spires
But if they went up somebody else built them
Your store is a small one, your goods have no buyers
Your parents are raising your children
O I could have told you the vices won't hold you warm in a coil where you lay
But high up they hang you, seized by the temple
And bid you obey and obey...

A heinous, heinous law
Of an endless, endless love
That governs your poor heart

In its velvety chambers, where fellows foul met
Engage in exchanges
Whose ends are to put out your lights
Who know from the inside you'd put up a fight

To a heinous, heinous law...

It's winter in my bedroom and I stir the broken spring
And I have in my head to go crawling
When the hounds come around I go to the bottle
Like every wet shadow before me
Now are you angry at me 'cos I'm no longer free?
I don't sound it or say it or feel it
But out on the street somebody told me
It happens to everyone
So I don't blame you, it's my foot in my shoe
And I seem to have easily filled it
While the thing in my charge, whether tiny or large
I fear I may slowly have killed it

Obeying a heinous, heinous law...