Bruce Cockburn When You Give It Away Lyrics

When You Give It Away Lyrics

Slid out of my dreams like a baby out of the nurse's hands

Onto the hard
floor of day

I'd been wearing OJ's gloves and I couldn't get them off

It was too early but I couldn't sleep

Showered and dressed, stepped
out into the heat

The parrot things on the porch next door

Announced my arrival on Chartres Street

With their finest rendition of
squealing brakes 



Down in Kaldi's caf the newspaper headlines
promised new revelations

Concerning Prince Charles' Amex account

A
morose young man in old-tim Austrian drag

Stares past his long mustache
at the ground

And last night's punks and fetish kids

All tattoos
and metal bits

And in the other corner (wearing the white trunks)

Today's tourists already sweating 



Deep in the city of the
saints and fools

Pearls before pigs and dung become jewels

I sit
down with tigers, I sit down with lambs

None of them know who exactly I
am 



I've got this thing in my heart

I must give you today

It only lives when you

Give it away

Languid mandalla of the
ceiling fan

Teases the air like a slow stroking hand

Study the
faces, study the cards

Study the shadow creeping over the yard 



I've got this thing in my heart

I must give you today

It only
lives when you

Give it away

Trouble with the nations, trouble with
relations

Where you going to go to find illumination?

Too much to
carry, too much to let go

Time goes fast - learning goes slow 



But I've got this thing in my heart

I must give you today

It
only lives when you

Give it away