Leonard Cohen – Stories of the Street Lyrics

Presuming this song to be inspired, at least in part, by Leonard Cohen’s 1961 Havana Adventure, Cohen’s contextualization of the trip to Mark Rowland in Musician is important:

I don’t know why I did any of these things. I do remember that Fidel Castro used to be laughed at in America. He’d make these five-hour speeches – apparently he speaks beautifully – and he’d say, ‘They’re going to invade us,’ and people thought that was a big joke. But I thought they were going to invade them. So I went down there and immediately found myself accurately described as a ‘bourgeois individualist poet.’ I said, ‘That’s right. Suits me to a tee.’ I wrote a poem in one of my early books: ‘The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward.’ I was walking on the beach in the middle of one night and was suddenly surrounded by about 11 guys with Czechoslovakian submachine guns; I was an American who didn’t speak Spanish, and they thought I was the first guy off the landing boat. I was the first guy arrested. It was a bit tricky to sort this thing out. But they happened to be very gracious. Wherever they took me, by the end of the night we were drinking toasts to each other and ‘the friendship of the people’ and they let me go. A little later it hit the newspapers in North America that the airport had been bombed. I’m in this little seedy hotel in Havana and somebody knocks on my door and says, ‘You have to go down to the Canadian consulate right away.’ They don’t like the look of me there because I really do look like a Cuban revolutionary – I had a beard and wore khakis. Finally I’m brought in to one of the secretaries of the consulate – I’m pretending to be pretty tough. And he says to me, ‘Mr. Cohen. Your mother is very worried about you.’

Stories of the Street Lyrics by Leonard Cohen

[Verse 1]
The stories of the street are mine, the Spanish voices laugh
The Cadillacs go creeping now through the night and the poison gas
And I lean from my window sill in this old hotel I chose
Yes one hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose

[Verse 2]
I know you’ve heard it’s over now and war must surely come
The cities they are broke in half and the middle men are gone
But let me ask you one more time, oh children of the dusk
All these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?
[Verse 3]
And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still that were coming home to me?
Oh lady with your legs so fine, oh stranger at your wheel
You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal

[Verse 4]
The age of lust is giving birth, and both the parents ask
The nurse to tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass
And now the infant with his cord is hauled in like a kite
And one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night

[Verse 5]
Oh come with me my little one, we will find that farm
And grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am
Oh take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb

[Verse 6]
With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl
I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky
And lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye