The Jungle Line

Rousseau walks on trumpet paths

Safaris to the heart of all that jazz

Through I bars and girders-through wires and pipes

The mathematic circuits of the modern nights

Through huts, through Harlem, through jails and gospel pews

Through the class on Park and the trash on Vine

Through Europe and the deep deep heart of Dixie blue

Through savage progress cuts the jungle line

In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer

Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear

Those cannibals-of shuck and jive

They'll eat a working girl like her alive

With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand

He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines

And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band

He hangs it up above the jungle line

The jungle line, the jungle line

Screaming in a ritual of sound and time

Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind

And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in

Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke

Coy and bitchy, wild and fine

And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats

Charging, chanting down the jungle line

There's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb

There's a poppy snake in a dressing room

Poppy poison-poppy tourniquet

It slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit

And metal skin and ivory birds

Go steaming up to Rousseau's vines

They go steaming up to Brooklyn Bridge

Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line