Lou Reed The City In The Sea/Shadow lyrics

Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city alone
Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city alone

Their shrines and palaces are not like ours
They do not tremble and rot eaten with time
Death has reared himself a throne
Lifted by forgotten winds resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie a crown of stars
In a strange city alone
A heaven God does not condemn
But the everlasting shadow makes mockery of it all

No holy rays come down
Lights from the lurid deep sea
Stream up the turrets silently
Up thrones, up arbors
Of sculpted ivy and stone flowers

Up domes, up spires
Kingly halls all are melancholy shrines
The columns, frieze and entablature
Chokingly shockingly intertwined

The mast the viol and the vine twisted
There amid no earthly moans
Hell rises from a thousand thrones, does reverence to death

And death does give his undivided time

There are open temples
And graves on a level with the waves
Death looms and looks, huge, gigantic
There is a ripple, now a wave

Towers thrown aside
Sinking in the dull tide
The waves glowing redder
The very hours losing their breath

All the cunning stars watching fitfully over night
After night of matchless sleep
Matched only with the whole of dream
The tell-tale beating of the heart the breath

The desire, the pose
One poses upon the precipice
To fall to run to dive to tumble to fall down
Down into the spiral down and then

One sees one's own death
One sees one committing murder
Or atrocious violent acts and T