One Crowded Hour - Augie March

Now, should you expect to see something that you hadn’t seen

In somebody you’d known since you were sixteen?

If love is a bolt from the blue

Then what is that bolt but a glorified screw?

And that doesn’t hold nothing together

Far from these nonsense bars and their nowhere music

It’s making me sick and I know it’s making you sick

There’s nothing there, it’s like eating air

It’s like drinking gin with nothing else in

And that doesn’t hold me together

But for one crowded hour

You were the only one in the room

I sailed around all those bumps in the night

To your beacon in the gloom

I thought I had found my golden September

In the middle of that purple June

But one crowded hour

Would lead to my wreck and ruin

Now, I know you like your boys who take their medicine

From the bowl of a silver spoon

Who run away with the dish and scale the fish

By the silvery light of the moon

Who were taught from the womb to believe till the tomb

That as far as their bleeding eyes see

Is a pleasure pen, meant for them

Builded and rent for them, not for the likes of me

No, not for the likes of you and me

And for one crowded hour

You were the only one in the room

And I sailed around all those bumps in the night

To your beacon in the gloom

I thought I had found my golden September

In the middle of that purple June

But one crowded hour

Would lead to my wreck and ruin

Oh, but the green-eyed harpy of the salt land

She takes into hers, my hand

She says, «Boy, I know you’re lying

Oh, but then so am I!»

And to this I said, «Oh well»

Now, put me in a cage full of lions, I’ll learn to speak lion

In fact I know the language well

I picked it up while I was versing myself

In the languages they speak in hell

That night that silence gave birth to a baby

But they took it away to her silent dismay

And they raised it to be lady

Now she can’t keep her mouth shut

And for one crowded hour

You were the only one in the room

And I sailed around all those bumps in the night

To your beacon in the gloom

I thought I had found my golden September

In the middle of that purple June

But one crowded hour

Would lead to my wreck and ruin

Yes, that one crowded hour

You were the only one in the room

Well, I played a few songs for those bumps in the night

In fact, I played this very tune

But you said, «What is this six-stringed instrument

But an adolescent loom?»

And one crowded hour

Would lead to my wreck and ruin

Yes, and one crowded hour

Would lead to my wreck and ruin

Oh, and that one crowded hour

Would lead to my wreck and ruin