| Rousseau walks on trumpet paths
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| Safaris to the heart of all that jazz
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| Through I bars and girders-through wires and pipes
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| The mathematic circuits of the modern nights
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| Through huts, through Harlem, through jails and gospel pews
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| Through the class on Park and the trash on Vine
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| Through Europe and the deep deep heart of Dixie blue
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| Through savage progress cuts the jungle line
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| In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer
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| Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear
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| Those cannibals-of shuck and jive
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| They’ll eat a working girl like her alive
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| With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand
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| He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines
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| And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band
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| He hangs it up above the jungle line
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| The jungle line, the jungle line
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| Screaming in a ritual of sound and time
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| Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind
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| And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in
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| Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke
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| Coy and bitchy, wild and fine
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| And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats
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| Charging, chanting down the jungle line
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| There’s a poppy wreath on a soldier’s tomb
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| There’s a poppy snake in a dressing room
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| Poppy poison-poppy tourniquet
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| It slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit
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| And metal skin and ivory birds
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| Go steaming up to Rousseau’s vines
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| They go steaming up to Brooklyn Bridge
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| Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line |