Hope and Crown

It’s not often that I’d post a draft of a song up here, but this one kinda came out all in one go, and I get all excited and energised when that happens, so I wanted to share it with you. Any suggestions welcome, too.

Linc

Hope & Crown

We stumbled on into the bar, and I knew that I’d seen her face before, I think her name was Anne or Anna, and I think that we’d both been to school together the year before. I can’t recall exactly why we went in there at all, but I had never seen that much of any girl before. So Caleb got his cigarettes and grabbed me as he headed for the street. I got one foot out the door when Anne or Anna turned and looked around, then right at me. I can’t recall exactly where I’d seen that look before, like she was crying out for help but they were crying out for more, at the Hope and Crown.

They didn’t have no dancing girls the next time I went by a few months later. They tried to clean the carpet but instead they cleaned out all the clientele, save for a couple sailors with tattoos on their arms of birds to guide them back to land, and secrets in their faces, and in the creases of their hands. They were talking to a kitchenhand that moved to town some twenty years before. She said one night she’d packed a bag, and with her daughter flew for seven hours here from Singapore. She told us that her husband was a killer and a dealer, and all the while her smiling face stared down a margarita at the Hope and Crown.

Through the window, I saw someone’s lady laying down a taxi fare, and the smaller sailor watched her through his empty glass, and I think he knew that she’d find him there. She came in from the corner drunk and looking for a fight, and looking like an ashtray that’s been left out in the rain all night.

She said “I ain’t never fired a gun, but I think that I’d feel like I feel now. I got my finger on the trigger, with the words I gotta give to you, but hear me out.”

He said “I’ll keep you out of trouble if that’s what I gotta do, even if I wind up in the gutter lying next to you, near the Hope and Crown.”