Mistreat me darling, and I might just disappear

Upon freighter running dark out of Algiers

Put tiny grains in children tears

While taking twenty five percent

Of all the flashbulbs and mementos

From the mechanized divisions rolling over your frontiers I saw my baby talking to a man today

Speaking softly in a confidential way

I saw a shadow pull his glove off

As a bluebird flew over, life's no pleasure

When you doubt the one you love Who are all these strangers? I never will go back again, go back into the past

For the flood is rising fast

You can break your window and look down

Into the muddy glass, it's a mirror or a lens to burn Now there was a deal done in Benghazi and Belgrade

Upon a scimitar or other crooked blade

Ransacks and loots, vacated suits

And a pistol points but never shoots

An army sitting in a locomotive yard without their boots Upstairs, your man is painting rain out in the street

Imagines woman that he's destined still to meet

He's trying to sidetrack one to count on

Caught somewhere between a countess and a courtesan

And it's only love to feign and then it's gone Who are all these strangers? He's a privateer as dusk gets near

A brigand after dark, his victim lined with chalk

A corsair filled with horsehair to the core

Dashed on your eyes of Adamantine

You despised his stripling whine That little smudger and the mouthpiece that he's with

Using his clause just like a practiced finger smith

I dreamed I took his digit prints

And then I sewed them on a villain's hands

Watched him ransom and demand and then called the flatfoots in I never will go back again, go back into the past

The flood is rising fast

You can break your window and look down

Into the muddy glass, it's a mirror or a lens to burn Who are all these strangers?

All these strangers

Sat upon a narrow bed

Thought about the things she said

All these strangers How I wished the night would end

Tried to stop the days ahead

I'd carve her name down in the wood

Some small remembrance if I could