Lyrics Whaz' Zat ? - Shawn Phillips

Whaz' Zat ?

Lightning slaying shadows
In the tremors of the night
While he creeps among the alleys
Bringing fear before the fright
She sleeps in tattered trousers
In the ballroom’s decadence
Moaning gently of her dreaming
By escorted precedence
Antiquated babblings
From a constant stream of thought
Sensitively wringing out
The rags that he has caught
Patting yet her bulging belly
She so slowly cries a smile
In anticipated suffering
Of her slowly growing child
He is speeding in a vacuum
Going nowhere, but, of course
He might believe in discipline
Of a bloody kind of sort
Naturally a state of race
A never changing spate of hate
While everything in some weird way
Does manage to relate
To her it doesn’t matter more
Its chasms have been leapt
And she leans upon the skepticism
Of her chosen fate
Stand tall, you spittle-smattered son of man
Stand up, you hear them say
To slap you down and kick your teeth
And smile across the bay
Irrelevant eloquent pleading
Wasn’t what she did this year
She passed it by and told a lie
And shed a crystal tear
For him to see, from valley’s edge
From plateaus in the sand
And yet he has beshit himself
For being just a man
A bragging crowing sort of twit
A cast-off shade of pink
Who’s brought himself and all the rest
Unto the very brink
Yet that magic urge
Continues on and plays continuum
A song of pleasure and of pain
Until that will be done