Black Madonna will come down for you   With open arms and a veil to hide her face   And Black Madonna will come down for you   And there is no sickness and there is no suffering   And there is no anguish and no anger that she cannot erase      You might see Black Madonna walking between the sheets of an angry day   Or you might see her smile a strange-sad smile as she steps out of your way   Or you might not see her at all   But she might be coming down for you   With her arms spread wide and her head on fire   'cause she sees you been down so long      There isn't a sin that you could make that she will not forgive      But oh, Black Madonna, I did not believe her beauty   I thought I did not need her mercy   I thought I did not need   Traded my belongings and my body   My memory and my mind   My center of gravity and my sense of direction   'til I woke up half an hour from the city   And realized I had lost all sense of the passage of time   So I don't know if it's been a day or a week or a year   All I know is I'm still here   And I always thought you'd lift me up   And you never did   What the fuck?      >>there isn't a sin that you could make   That she will not forgive   No there isn't a sin that you could make   In the ways that a stray must live      So what I wanna know is this   If you believe in everything fitting into a kind of place   If you believe that everything and everybody has a certain space they fit into—babies entering into a welcoming world in jubilant curls of star gazing wonder   And the sick yes even the sick just a shuffling into sleep's dark brother   And the sleepers in the sleet   The heaps in the street   Nestled under trestles for to get a little heat   And if the trestles watch over the sleepers   And if life ushers her lucky winners   Through fleshy gates to four star dinners   And if sleep ushers his population   To plug into the dream life radio station   And if thin souls whose bodies haven't wrecked them   Walk smoky streets that know and expect them   Then what I want to know is this—   What of strays who have turned their backs on the god of strays?      >>what of strays who've turned their backs   On the god of strays, yeah, what of them?      Oh Black Madonna I was thinking about the days that I spent with you   'cause now I doze and daze and drown   And cling to the wreckage of a sinking town   And I walk your dire streets in search of anything that's still pure   'cause I once thought you watched over me   But now I'm not so sure