Drinking Gasoline
I didn’t realise this was a song until I happened across the chorus, forgotten in my notebook, and it exploded. The ‘dinosaurs are drinking gasoline’ line reflects a hope that we’ll give up these dumb tin boxes before too long… but if we don’t the roaches will do just fine without us. Lead track from ‘Skin And Bone’.
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Walking out on 14th St the hollow people know
The secret bargain that the city seeks to make
The city’s hunger is a ghost that’s growing stronger
With every stolen mouthful that it takes
Manhattan is an island of privateers and pirates
The sunken treasure of a rich and stinking ship
I ride the tunnels with the rest you know I try my best
To fight the panic as the stitches start to rip
And the rats are running in the subway
The fat cats are choking on the cream
The roaches are creeping in the plumbing
And the dinosaurs are drinking gasoline
Future archaeologists will dive off the New Jersey coast
And say here lies Atlantis in a dream
They’ll fill their boots with artifacts with post millennium bric-a-brac
From Times Square tourist traps amid the darkened screens
The swamp remembers every pool of stagnant water
These granite bones remember dynamite
The demons under old Manhattan pent up in the subway
Are screaming for another sacrifice
And the rats are running in the subway
The fat cats are choking on the cream
The roaches are creeping in the plumbing
And the dinosaurs are drinking gasoline
The cruelest privilege of all is to ignore the necks
You step on as you clamber up the stairs
And as the waters rise to have dry feet and sympathize
With all the drowning people who were there
The theatre of America is looking for a superstar
To sell the headline news on CNN
They’re waiting for the season of the hurricane disease
As all the madness of the summer starts again
And the rats are running in the subway
The fat cats are choking on the cream
The roaches are creeping in the plumbing
And the dinosaurs are drinking gasoline
