Ain't it just like the night to play tricks
when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin'
And Louise holds a handful of rain,
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
Just Louise and her lover so
And these visions of Johanna
where the ladies play blindman's bluff
And the all-night girls they whisper
of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman
Ask himself if it's him or them
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
The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones
Where these visions of Johanna
he takes himself so seriously
he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall
Muttering small talk at the wall
And these visions of Johanna,
they kept me up past the dawn
Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say,
“Jeeze I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars
hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna,
they make it all seem so cruel
Well, the peddler now speaks to the countess
who’s pretending to care for him
that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out
and say a prayer for him”
But like Louise always says
“Ya 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 her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys
And these visions of Johanna
