"A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes"

A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes
were smoking out along the open road;
the night was very dark and thick between them,
each man beneath his ordinary load.
"I'd like to tell my story,"
said one of them so young and bold,
"I'd like to tell my story,
before I turn into gold."
But no one really could hear him,
the night so dark and thick and green;
well I guess that these heroes must always live there
where you and I have only been.
Put out your cigarette, my love,
you've been alone too long;
and some of us are very hungry now
to hear what it is you've done that was so wrong.

I sing this for the crickets,
I sing this for the army,
I sing this for your children
and for all who do not need me.
"I'd like to tell my story,"
said one of them so bold,
"Oh yes, I'd like to tell my story
'cause you know I feel I'm turning into gold."

LC

Undertow

I set out one night
When the tide was low
There were signs in the sky
But I did not know
I'd be caught in the grip
Of the undertow
Ditched on a beach
Where the sea hates to go
With a child in my arms
And a chill in my soul
And my heart the shape
Of a begging bowl

L.Cohen

Stories Of The Street

The stories of the street are mine,the Spanish voices laugh.
The Cadillacs go creeping now through the night and the poison gas,
and I lean from my window sill in this old hotel I chose,
yes one hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose.
I know you've heard it's over now and war must surely come,
the cities they are broke in half and the middle men are gone.
But let me ask you one more time, O children of the dusk,
All these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?

And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still that were coming home to me?
O lady with your legs so fine O stranger at your wheel,
You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.

The age of lust is giving birth, and both the parents ask
the nurse to tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass.
And now the infant with his cord is hauled in like a kite,
and one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night.

O come with me my little one, we will find that farm
and grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm.
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am,
O take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb.

With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl
I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world.
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky,
and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye

L.Cohen

When this American woman

When this American woman,
whose thighs are bound in casual red cloth,
comes thundering past my sitting place
like a forest-burning Mongol tribe,
the city is ravished
and brittle buildings of a hundred years
splash into the street;
and my eyes are burnt
for the embroidered Chinese girls,
already old,
and so small between the thin pines
on these enormous landscapes,
that if you turn your head
they are lost for hours.

Leonard Cohen from "Let Us Compare Mythologies"

BREAVMAN

knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.
A bullet broke into the flesh of his father's arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.
On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woolen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.
Children show scars lilce medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.