My Remake of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

Here's something unusual. I heard Leonard Cohen's song, "Hallelujah," and loved it, but I found the lyrics unrelievedly, almost monochromatically, diminished.

So I conceived the challenge: could I write new lyrics for the song--lyrics that would equal (if not surpass) the quality of the original lyrics, lyrics that would express a positively augmented view of the universe yet not be brightly pollyannish?

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is:


The streets were filled with dying men,
The women whom you'd once again
Disappointed when they saw right through ya.
But underneath the dust, you saw
The rising lava of the law,
The owners of each store sang hallelujah.

The craters of the silent moon
Poured out their silver streams, and soon
The stars of empty space were flying through ya.
The mountain top, the frozen air,
Your coal black horse, your streaming hair,
Without words, your soul cried, hallelujah

When hunger melted all their pride,
On the hill the groom and bride
Were singing to each other, singing to ya.
The woods were still, the roads all roared
Diminished and augmented chords,
That thundered in the halls of hallelujah.

So I set down my golden pen
I wrapped myself in silk and Zen,
I was all alone and I outgrew ya.
But I returned to clean the bath,
I felt the joy, the pity, wrath,
And it was all a muted hallelujah.

Joshua listened to the Lord,
The trumpet blast, the crashing chord
Shivered Jericho and overthrew ya.
The walls sank down into the ground,
And from a broken room, the sound In the midst of battle, hallelujah.

The Ant Walked Through The Door

The ant walked through the door,
Which turned into a crescent sword.
The floor heaved, it bounded, it gently billowed,
Entire oceans drained into small wormholes.
Clouds were whisked away
And left skies with stark terror on their faces.
Cars that were driving purposefully
Tumbled into the San Andreas fault.
And no wonder old people tottered fearfully along the undulating boardwalk,
No wonder love shut the slats of its concession stand,
No wonder the Warbasse apartments shuddered,
No wonder buttered toast ceased to thrill the acquisitive mind.
The cat sat in the high cabinet
Meditating thoughtlessly,
The smell of salt was invisible, it rested upon the chestnut trees.
The curious automobiles came and went on their secret rounds,
And Mrs. Baum stood in her kitchen, preparing chicken.

A Quantity of Wheat

It seems that such a quantity of wheat will be sold today,
That the markets will be filled with the rustle of cloths,
The sun will beat down hotly on sandaled feet,
Storekepers will cry their wares with distorted faces,
In shadowed alcoves, men will drink sweetened, yellow drinks,
The long lines of camels will shimmer from the distance in the hot, bright air,
The pastry boy will rush through the crowd
With a fragrant tray of sweet loaves,
From the bakery to which merchants brought flour
From mills that stand silent upon the river flowing to the sea.
In the bakery men work frantically
Shaping flour into dough and dough into bread and pastries
That is carried on platters through the bazaar blazing streets,
To the homes of satraps,
To the doors of impoverished widows,
Bringing satiety, bringing delight,
Bringing the mystery of their scent.

The Moon Swiveled Around

The moon swiveled around
So that I could only see the back of her head.
How silent were the stars.
But we, we were chattering in the back seat,
In the front seat,
We flipped through the puddles,
We raced through the snowfields,
We rushed up the mountains to fields of caravans,
We hunched over and dug for radishes,
We were pursued by a beating heart through the windy downtown tenements in our dreams,
We curled in sleep in the branches of the universal tree
And slept, beloved.

The mystic moon was as clear as steel,
As tearless as glass,
As bright as a scintillating day
That waited patient and expectant,
That was the absence of all self
Except for the lumbering Jackson Pollack souls,
All of us, spattered exclamations of black, red, yellow ferment
Seeping into the sere dawn,
Our scattered colors catching on the colors of others,
The moon turned her head and the heavens were still,
And in that stillness
Our hearts were seized with stillness
And then spoke, of their own accord.

The Revelation Wasn't Old

The revelation wasn’t old.
It struck with all the force of a meteor.
There was a red fire and there was a white pillar
That was shining now, not then.
It was a time when every track is new,
When every landscape is a red fire and a white pillar of cloud.
Where is the red fire today?
Where is the white pillar of cloud?
Where is Egypt? Where is the terror of its cavalry?
(The cavalry that is real.)
Where is the glory of the constant press
Into the unknown redemption?
On the path to the sea,
Babies were still crying,
They still needed their diapers changed.
What a thing:
To see nothing on the way to the Red Sea
But the changing of diapers!
On the first night of Passover,
The Jews could not sleep.
And then,
They no longer wished to sleep.
When all of creation sleeps,
If we sing the words and listen,
We can hear that we are already singing within ourselves.
Already, we are awake,
Very busy, in fact.
Already, red fires blaze,
White clouds of smoke.
What color is your voice?
Are your words intaglio or bas relief?
Don't guess. Look inside.
See the drifting leaves of words upon your stream of prayer,
The green trumpet of voice,
The printer’s lead letters dripping indigo ink,
The granite statues of words like mountains
Among which you wander,
The white and pastel acrylic oils of words,
The stainless steel monuments with sharp edges,
A landscape of solid, skyscraper steel words.
What is your pillar of fire,
Your pillar of cloud?
What is its fresh, clear scent?