(What’s this song about?)
Well, I went in for some medicine
Feelin’ like a wounded soldier
Deathly pale and a woman did come to my bedside
A regular Florence Nightingale
But my girlfriend just wasn’t having the comparison
So I back-pedaled, said “okay then
How bout Mary Magdalene?”
Anyway, I was reminded of a dream
I had as my confidence came and went
Where all the girls from the 90’s
Were singing “Just Around the Riverbend”
All along the banks of the Arkansas
And I paddled through in a dugout canoe
I was a John Smith cartoon, with a strong jaw
Listen I’m white, middle-class and male
And the dream does tell a tale
Of Whiteness dreaming of Whiteness
With a want for wisdom that might tip
The scale ’cause my friend and I felt an affinity
With the tribes in the documentary
That plays on a loop in the backmost
Wing of the Museum of Natural History
But my imperialist didn’t suddenly
Die he just loosened his tie and took a
Knee and Disneyland never made a man
That’s all just false idolatry that’s all just false I-
Florence Nightingale
Comes in with a lamp, they say
On stormy nights when the wound’s remembering
Talks to me about that photograph
Me and my brother on the sidewalk
Holding squirt guns and squinting in the sun
That was the summer I was nine
Well it’s a sunny day
At Sugar Sugar High School
And the quarterback and track star are cuttin’
Class and shootin’ pool well this is not to
Say that they should be in class
Still why they have to be such assholes?
It’s as if we men just want to be
Picked up sequentially
And held to the breast of a giantess
Who stands ten miles out at sea
Or, alternatively, we could find success
You know really be the best then maybe
We could rest upon our father’s knee
Florence Nightingale
Comes in with a lamp, they say
On stormy nights when the wound’s remembering
Talks to me about that photograph
Me and my brother on the sidewalk
Holding squirt guns and squinting in the sun
That was the summer I was nine
Mary Magdalene
Was at Golgotha, they say
She saw the water separate from the
Blood and I look at that painting
Of him hanging so peacefully with
Mary by his bleeding side that was
The summer he was 33
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