That’s the first verse, people. Come on, now,
and worship with me. If you were going to begin writing the lyric
to a pretty, stars-above-the-campfire acoustic guitar number, the
odds would be a billion to one — a trillion, maybe — against
your choosing “The singing grandfather will saw off your head”
as the first line. Even if you were going for the perversely gory
folk song, do you think you’d have the requisite vision to identify
the song’s protagonist by an epithet that in its use of the definite
article seems to suggest that we all already know just who the song
is talking about? If you’d rhymed the first two lines, would
you have had the poetic insight to let the third line sort of just
trail off into the darkness of unrhyme, and to leave it standing there
all by itself? Because as the scratching of the fingers across the
bassy brass strings continues, the next line you hear is
The singing grandfather — buzzsaw sings in the night |
