Leonard Cohen - Death of a Ladys Man

This curious paragraph is obviously distilled from a longer undated journal entry probably written during the spring or summer of 1975. I give it in its entirety.

Thinking of some times with Alexandra, one night when I wept for the injustice in the world, the promises I made to the weak and fatherless on her double bed. I knelt down beside a stream and I was invested with the high duty to protect them. Someone hooked a feathered shield on my forearm, and lowered a feathered helmet on my head. My left arm armoured, my right arm armoured, the mind fortified. This was not a dream. The stream flowed by me, manifested in a room above the pavement in New York. Later, just before I mastered her, she turned golden in the bathroom, gold and towering, suggesting strongly with an immense chrome hand that I give up and worship her. I think I did. My thighs were so thin she was alarmed. She thought I was starving.

Now I lie in a pool of fat, ashamed before the daisies to be what I am. Eight years ago, and then the obscene silence of my career, while the butchers climbed on the throne, and they hacked the veil away, and they stood there above us grinning, not even bothering to cover themselves. I made a treaty with those who saw, but I broke it under torture. I was divided into three parts. One part was given to a wife, one part was given to money, one part was given to the daisies. And Alexandra herself bound to the world, babies, a cigarette holder, an accent accelerating toward a wordless gargle and swoon in the Poets Corner. The last time we met, in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, I punished her by whispering, Some of us still take acid.

Distant battles you may say, but G-d, how ugly your clothes are. You wear them like the ludicrous stripes of bondage. And you are the winners. You are the guards. And even the butchers above you are not in command. I broke under the sentence of loneliness and the wound of my beautiful twin. These veterans are to be avoided, the old campaigns, the view from the foxhole. You can see them tapping away in every garden. And many other spirits complaining, the ground with a voice, the buried fig tree, and now at noon, the sun over the windmill, the signal of the yellow daisies.

This is your moment now. I give you the knowledge to distinguish between what is holy and what is common. I touch you with a recollection of your grief. Here you are again, little priest. Bring your heart back to its place.

Looks like we wont

be making love at all

Too many people watching us

Looks like we wont

be meeting at the grill

Too many people touching us

Grease up your ass

Lets tear our love to pieces

Your beauty wont be anything

when I take off my glasses

Is that what theyre singing in the dungeons now? Is that the jingle muttered as slaves touch themselves? It is, O adventurous inspector of the semend cells, it is what theyre singing.