nI found the garden gate unlocked so I went innAnd picked the perfect spot where I could bury my youthnBut hounds of love and hounds of warnHounds galorenThose hoary hounds were pouncingnEach with waxy wooden toothsnRemember when it dawned on younThe day that you knew thatnYou could live forever and still never make a masterpiecenTo shut those pups up in the leastnBut everybody knowsnThat’s the way it goesnEven if you die on the oceannEvery Wednesday afternoonnMe and you bleeding on the newspaper classifiedsnDragging out the drinking down for high school kids whonDied out on the highway in the middle of the nightnSing a song that means you lovenEveryone who’s ever come within the soundnOf any of your cloudy wordsnBut get your song together firstnSave it ‘til you’re surenHang it on the doornSing it from the top of the mountainn‘Til everybody knowsnExactly how it goesnEven if you die on the oceannEven when you die on the oceannChildren screaming speeches into microscopic tape recordersnWired to the mire of the moatnAnd I was still at odds with several thousand nonbelieversnBoth above and belownSmoking silhouettes outside the school with all the cymbalistsnThe simplest way I knew to gonAnd we could talk ourselves into the dreary deepsnBefore we realized there was a hole in the boatnAnd everybody’s answer to the worldnWas “We should start another world!”nAnd I said, “What do you propose? Because you knownThe world that we’ve got going now has to benThe hardest place I’ve ever been.nIt’s got me shrinking in my skin, but then again, I guessnThat everybody knowsnThat’s just the way it goes.”nEven if you die on the oceannThere’s just so many crownsnAnd everybody drownsnEverybody dies on the ocean.