I found the garden gate unlocked so I went in   And picked the perfect spot where I could bury my youth   But hounds of love and hounds of war   Hounds galore   Those hoary hounds were pouncing   Each with waxy wooden tooths   Remember when it dawned on you   The day that you knew that   You could live forever and still never make a masterpiece   To shut those pups up in the least   But everybody knows   That’s the way it goes   Even if you die on the ocean   Every Wednesday afternoon   Me and you bleeding on the newspaper classifieds   Dragging out the drinking down for high school kids who   Died out on the highway in the middle of the night   Sing a song that means you love   Everyone who’s ever come within the sound   Of any of your cloudy words   But get your song together first   Save it ‘til you’re sure   Hang it on the door   Sing it from the top of the mountain   ‘Til everybody knows   Exactly how it goes   Even if you die on the ocean   Even when you die on the ocean   Children screaming speeches into microscopic tape recorders   Wired to the mire of the moat   And I was still at odds with several thousand nonbelievers   Both above and below   Smoking silhouettes outside the school with all the cymbalists   The simplest way I knew to go   And we could talk ourselves into the dreary deeps   Before we realized there was a hole in the boat   And everybody’s answer to the world   Was “We should start another world!”   And I said, “What do you propose? Because you know   The world that we’ve got going now has to be   The hardest place I’ve ever been.   It’s got me shrinking in my skin, but then again, I guess   That everybody knows   That’s just the way it goes.”   Even if you die on the ocean   There’s just so many crowns   And everybody drowns   Everybody dies on the ocean.