Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet ?
  We sit here stranded, though we're all doin our best to deny it
  And Louise holds a handfull of rain, tempting you to defy it
  Lights flicker from the opposite loft
  In this room the heat pipes just cough
  The country music station plays soft
  But there's nothing really nothing to turn of
  Just Louise and her lover so entwined
  And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.
    In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
  And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the D-train
  We can hear the night watcman click his flashlight
  Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
  Louise she's all right she's just near
  She's delicate and seems like the mirror
  But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
  That Johanna's not here
  The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
  Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.
    Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
  He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
  And when bringing her name up
  He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
  He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
  Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
  Oh, how can I explain ?
  It's so hard to get on
  And these visions of Johanna they kept me up past the dawn.
    Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
  Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
  But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
  You can tell by the way she smiles
  See the primitive wallflower freeze
  When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
  Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
  I can't find my knees"
  Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
  But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.
    The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
  Saying, "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
  But like Louise always says
  "Ya can't look at much, can ya man "
    As she, herself prepares for him
  And Madonna, she still has not showed
  We see this empty cage now corrode
  Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
  The fiddler, he now steps to the road
  He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
  On the back of the fish truck that loads
  While my conscience explodes
  The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
  And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.