Joni Mitchell - The Jungle Line lyrics

Rousseau walks on trumpet paths Safaris to the heart of all that jazz Through i bars and girders-through wires and pipes The mathematic circuits of the modern nights Through huts, through harlem, through jails and gospel pews Through the cla** on park and the trash on vine Through europe and the deep deep heart of dixie blue Through savage progress cuts the jungle line In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear Those cannibals-of shuck and jive They'll eat a working girl like her alive With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band He hangs it up above the jungle line The jungle line, the jungle line Screaming in a ritual of sound and time Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke Coy and b**hy, wild and fine And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats Charging, chanting down the jungle line There's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb There's a poppy snake in a dressing room Poppy poison-poppy tourniquet It slithers away on bra** like mouthpiece spit And metal skin and ivory birds Go steaming up to rousseau's vines They go steaming up to brooklyn bridge Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line