[Tim Sanders]
I am not Genghis Khan in a feverish state
I'm not even Genghis Khan in a wheelchair
I am not the loaded gun.
I'm useless unless you're performing experiments
On the cowardly and inane.
I am the bottle rocket slow motion
I'm writing this as an excuse to leave the lights on
I'm not writing this to step into the ring
With anybody except myself.
And, even then, I'm going down in the second round.
I'm not singing to the stars outside the window
I'm not at the street corner
Daring life to take its best shot at me.
Snatching fireflies from the nighttime
Tossin' 'em down like Boston Baked Beans
I'm really not going to point out to left field
To indicate a home run.
I am lighting fuses for the Cannonball Man
I am listening to the bam crack calamity boom boom
Of the typewriter machine go go go
Like its got answers
Like it's not just Oz behind the curtain
Like it's a fully automatic weapon
Shining at high noon
With the clink clink clink of my spurs
Outside the saloon
I can do anything.
I, I can do anything.
[Buddy Wakefield]
On the edge of my seat
At the end of my rope
Where riddles bloom, where answers fold
I got a 20 year story still to be told
About a Cannonball Man in a circus side show.
Now that motherf**er was ready to explode
He had pressure pouring in from every hole
they lit his fuse, they watched him blow
But where he's gonna stop, nobody knows
Because they shot him off over the seas and the plains
Like lilacs across the sky
Like a dove inside the flames
On a candlewax train to paradise
But distance, man it began to spread
Between the flight of his feet
And the weight of head
And as he curled it all up between his knees
He caught wads of sun breaking up in the weeds
Goddamn that Cannonball man on ground
Because the rise and fall is so profound
Then 2,000 clowns want to pile from a car
With stretcher of mismatched cannonball parts
But no he picked up his brains, his eyes, his teeth
He gathered his words and made it all speak
And then he backed off the show with a well-lit fuse
And stuffed himself down in a cannonball tube.
And with a free man's grin
He took to flight
Right past the battling birds in the night
Who had cannonball eyes, cannonball teeth,
cannonball balls, and cannonball wings.
And with cannonballs stuck between their beaks
They all shot down and they broke on the streets
And as I looked up with feathers in my eyes.
On the edge of my seat at the end of the line
I saw lilacs humming across the sky
And a cannonball inside the flames
On a candlewax train to paradise.