"Ask, my love, just a whispered breath, and you will need not ask twice
I'll give free, what you need of me"

* Take out the garbage
* Mow the lawn
* Do the laundry
* Clean the kitchen

;)

Doubtless... the same funny thought occurred to me:

"Won't you come and share with me your wishes?"

Yeah, get your ass in the kitchen and do the dishes...

Attention! This post will contain some language that may make some of you uncomfortable, if you don't like rude language, read no further...


So, this is a little randy eh? :

There's a garden in my room
Would you like to take a look
Rest your body on my velvet rose


I was thinking more along the lines of:


There's a garden in my room
Pull out your mower of love
and trim my carpet of lust and desire


What do you think? :)

Tom

LOL! So essentially you think she really is asking her lover to "mow the lawn"? hee hee hee...

I meant randy, but slightly more subtle than that. ;-)

I don't think Tom "gets" it...

I love your lyrics. You've captured what the whole S&M thing is really about.

Anyway, UL, I'm in philly - there's a lot of GREAT record stores around here that have the most hard-to-find albums. Do some research; if you find one here, I'd be happy to go pick it up for ya.

Oh he gets it, he's just funning with me. :)

I can actually get the album from amazon, but it has to be shipped overseas and is pretty pricey. Thanks for the offer though!

Thanks also for your insightful and interesting commentary, Purp.

I wasn't really thinking of it as an S&M piece. But I suppose there are some unintentional connotations of bondage. Really it's about someone so completely in love that they are willing to do just about anything for their lover... it doesn't follow that their lover would actually ask them for anything out of the ordinary. Garden is about entrapment through seduction, through the promise of pleasure. Captive is meant to simply turn that around... basically the speaker is saying "ok, you've seduced me, now I'm going to try and be the best lover you've ever had, and in so doing, seduce you." At least that's how I intended it. But part of appreciating poetry is what you put into it, so if it strikes you as an S&M piece, whatever... as long as you liked it that's really all that matters. :)

In a way "Garden" is also putting a twist on the story of Eden, it's pretty hard to miss all the references to a garden of course, and the female speaker saying "it has apples sweet and ripe / if you want to have a taste, I'll let you." As the story of Eden goes, Eve tempts Adam with an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Adam and Eve get expelled from paradise for engaging in such behavior. This is why I wanted to include a reference to paradise in my own lyrics, since the singer in "Garden" is promising that she's got her own "garden" in which she and her lover-to-be can make their own paradise. "Garden" is retelling of the creation story such that temptation leads to paradise, instead of expulsion from paradise, and casting the female as one who bequeaths paradise as opposed to one who takes it away. It's one of the major reasons I like "Garden in my Room" so much--it runs counter to our excessively male-dominated history, much of which puts the blame for humanity's ills on women... Eve and her apple, Pandora and her box, yadda yadda yadda. All that bullshit pisses me off--Garden pegs the finger at that sexist patriarchy and that makes it okay in my book. :)

Interesting sidenote--I once rewrote the story of Pandora as a humorous piece for a writing assignment. In the original telling of the story of Prometheus and Pandora, two titans, Prometheus (who has foresight) and his brother Epimetheus (who has hindsight) at the direction of Zeus fashion all of the creatures of earth from clay, and then a god (Ares, if memory serves) breathes life into these creations. Each creation is given gifts--agility, fur, eyesight, whatever. When Prometheus finally makes man, who is supposed to have dominion over all the other creatures, he discovers there are no gifts left. Epimetheus has used them all up for the animals. Needing a suitable gift for humanity, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to man. As a punishment for Prometheus and mankind the gods create the first woman Pandora and send her to Prometheus. He figures the gods are up to something and so he does not accept her. She marries Epimetheus (brother of Prometheus) and one day Hermes (aka Mercury--messenger of the gods) shows up on their doorstep with a big heavy box that he would like to leave in their safekeeing for awhile. As soon as she is alone with the box, Pandora, curious about what is inside, opens it to find that Zeus/Jupiter has filled it with all manner of evils--vice, disease, etc. These evils (in the form of tiny winged creatures) pour out of the box and beset humanity in the worst way, the only succor to which is hope, the only good thing in Pandora's box which Epimetheus encourages Pandora to set free, since having already unleashed so much evil on the world, she could hardly make it any worse. Nice story, huh? Woman is the curse of humanity. Oh and by the way, curiousity/knowledge is BAD.

In my retelling, the gift Prometheus gives to humanity is Pandora. From my perspective, a world full of nothing but men doesn't exactly sound like paradise... and the creation of woman sounds like a far more suitable gift in such a situation. This is of course against the wishes of the gods and they punish Prometheus by giving him a crappy job on Olympus (they put him in charge of the forbidden knowledge files). He immediately sets about reorganizing the files and in so doing manages to irritate Zeus yet again (he files "fire" under "C" for "combustion"). After pulling fire from its new place in disbelief, Zeus demands an explanation from Prometheus. When Prometheus explains, the ruler of gods tosses fire aside and gives Prometheus a dressing down. But when he so carelessly tosses fire aside, it sails out the window, off the edge of Mount Olympus and falls down to the world of mortals... and thus it is Zeus who gives fire to humanity... by accident. Seeking to cover this up, the king of gods creates the Prometheus-gives-fire-to-mankind story and uses it as a pretext to lock Prometheus up. In the meantime, the gift of woman seems to be working out pretty well for humanity, and this is also a thorn in Zeus's side. The good ideas are supposed to come from him, after all, he's the big man. So he creates Pandora's box and ships it off to Epimetheus and Pandora, but Epimetheus, gifted only with hindsight (and therefore, stupid) stumbles while carrying it into the house--dropping it and spilling its contents to the wind.

Chuck is right, I get it just fine, but he and I go WAY back with "randy" lyrics, stories, and scripts. As a matter of fact, this stuff is so tame by comparison to the things we wrote when we were kids, yikes! :)

Tom