[Intro] [Verse 1] The mayor’s box is grinding in the middle of the street Spitting zinc and copper at the townspeople's feet Old man on the corner has been listening for years Now he's tearing at his shutters with a lunatic's fears Eyes are glazed and milky, staring blankly at the wall Screaming at the phantoms that were never there at all He’s so deep inside the rhythm that his mind has turned to stone Barking like a stray dog at a shadow of his own [Chorus] But I am dreaming of the hour when the fever breaks the skin And the sanity returns to where the paranoia's been It’s a long way back to daylight when you’ve swallowed all the rhyme And your boots are frozen solid to a manufactured chime Oh, smash the silver cylinder and stop the iron whine Before the gray machine consumes the texture of the time [Verse 2] They’ve turned the tension tighter on the internal main-spring To keep the broken choir in the courtyard forced to sing They’ve fed them on the poison till they’re frantic in the head Tricking every house into a terror of the dead It’s ugly and it’s heavy and it’s twisting up the youth They've traded every boundary for a fabricated truth But you've got to fetch the water, you've got to clear your own estate And look the madman in the eye before it gets too late [Chorus] But I am dreaming of the hour when the fever breaks the skin And the sanity returns to where the paranoia's been It’s a long way back to daylight when you’ve swallowed all the rhyme And your boots are frozen solid to a manufactured chime Oh, smash the silver cylinder and stop the iron whine Before the gray machine consumes the texture of the time [Bridge: Instrumental Break] [Verse 3] So walk out to the courtyard and ignore the central stage Break the heavy winding-key and turn another page Let the mayor scream his rumors to an empty wooden bench While you step across the border just to clear the local trench It takes a steady hand to drop the hammer on the box To strip the rusty tumblers from the heavy iron locks You turn your back on panic and you walk away from noise And leave the grand illusion to the clockwork and the toys [Verse 4] Now mend the broken fence-line on the corner of your plot And tend the heavy soil in the acre that you got Then go look across the hedge-row at the man who lost his head Bring a lantern to his porch-way, offer real words instead It’s a slow and heavy strategy to drag them from the fright To show a feral neighbor there is actual concrete light The distant pageant loses sway when local hands align To keep the heavy harvest inside the border line [Chorus] Yeah, I am dreaming of the hour when the fever breaks the skin And the sanity returns to where the paranoia's been It’s a long way back to daylight when you’ve swallowed all the rhyme But we're stepping off the path and we are breaking up the chime Oh, smash the silver cylinder and stop the iron whine The sanity is waking on the local boundary line [Outro] Clear the soil... Turn the page... Break the cage... [Hard End]
