Now I’m here, 

standing barefoot in the snow

Everything I own 

lays scattered down the road

I look back across my shoulder

at a place I used to know

The man behind my old front door 

says I can’t come back no more

His rambling was incoherent

He played guitar with revelry

He said that he was Jesus Christ 

the whole wide world, his enemy

His fingers moved across the frets 

as if greased in Vaseline

He tried to put out wild fires 

with a can of gasoline

I met a girl within those walls 

from the land of revolutions

Her room was filled with wallflowers,

it was a jungle of illusion

She made sunshine from a box of pegs 

and roll of chicken wire

She’ll paint your whole world yellow 

and set your heart on fire

I lived there in the boiler room 

where I painted by the night

And the paranoid musician

would keep the house uptight

With jealousy, suspicion

and his grandiose delusions,

he would brandish accusations 

and demand his absolution

She was reading in the kitchen 

when the storm began to rage

As if the tale of Robinson Crusoe 

had been summoned from the page

Waves crashed upon the quarterdeck

and washed me out to sea

Dragged down in the undercurrent

I was jettisoned debris

His anger had consumed him

with unrivalled potency. 

And who fell into the firing line,

just happened to be me

I was banished from his dwelling 

and cast out to the street. 

He cursed and spat and hollered 

as I made a swift retreat

Now I’m here, 

standing barefoot in the snow

I collect up all my things 

and I walk on down the road