PoetBay.com, the poetry webpage where you can publish your poems and short stories

Theme music of an age...

Visions Of Johanna by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doing' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting' you to defy it
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 to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's buff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper their escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's really him or them that's insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like veneer
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

[Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lot of gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn]

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa must of 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

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Saying', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"You can't look at much, can you 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 everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
,

Poetry by Chaucer Whethers