| guardate che ho trovato su frances....ora, qualcuno traduce??
bells ringing through the song's intro)
Scenario: Miranda has more or less bottomed out. He has tried calling home, but nobody is answering the phone. He waits thirteen endless seconds before finally giving up (these thirteen seconds stretch into several minutes, owing to his apprehension, and time distortion from the drugs.)
It's been thirteen seconds
Since you all last said
I've become the apparition
You predicted for my death
As he's been waiting, he's been too nervous to pay any attention to the prophecy given to him by his family upon his leaving that he would die, which usually plays over and over in his head like a looped tape. He has "become the apparition" in the sense of Burroughs' contention that the junkie is "el hombre invisible", a living ghost.
You said that flirting
Brings you closer to the end
You can bait into the water
But you'll never get the hint
Miranda had been acting-out at home, probably dabbling in drugs, though the reference to "flirting" bringing on disaster brings to mind the kind of blame that rape victims are often subject by allegations that their behavior brought on the attack, and gives me the feeling that if his family actually believes him on any level about what happened to him, they probably believe it was his own flirting that got him into that situation anyway. And, now, the drugs seem to be heading the same way in their opinion. They have used this line of reasoning with him countless times before, but like the wary fish, he hasn't fallen for it, and anyway, they have no real clue what kind of pain he has been going through.
And like a stain of bricks
Goes dancing by your head
The bricks, which could have stained them (with associations of guilt -- scarlet letter kind of thing), have just whizzed by their heads. They missed being branded by the allegations he threw at them before he left by a hair's breadth.
Plucked from an icebox
Grafted on my skin
This is the icepick, which of course is one a series of phallic symbols in the piece. Normally fluid, like water, you put it in the icebox to harden it up. Which is to imply that it's not getting hard on its own the way it should be -- which is symptomatic of the abuse. He grafts it in it's erect state on his skin, which is to say that he had felt emasculated owing to the sexual abuse, but the syringe (ice pick) has made that feeling go away.
My coat has hid the marks
Mink hits the shovel fix
His coat hides his track marks. And, as we will see in Cassandra, junk has become his new predatory lover, which drives him closer and closer to the grave.
Near the sway of pendulums
A reference to Edgar Allen Poe's tale of the Spanish Inquision, "The Pit and the Pendulum." If Miranda is "near the sway of pendulums", he is deep in the pit. Could also locate Miranda in Baltimore, of which Poe is the most famous former resident (with all due respect, of course, to John Waters and Divine...)
Boar abrasions and a kiss
The pigs hurt him back at home, for sure, but they continue to hurt him here. I am thinking Miranda is quite young, and the feminine nickname suggests he is probably a bit effeminate. He is probably regular prey to the tougher elements in his environment, who both beat him (the abrasions) and possibly rape him, although there's a good likelihood that he, like a lot of runaways, has turned to prostitution to support himself and his addiction.
She said I'll never let them hurt you.
I'll never let them in.
Frances had vowed to protect him, but failed to do so.
What you took from me is mine
What is mine I'll never give.
A lot was taken from Miranda owing to the abuse -- his innocence, his comfort with sexuality, his trust... hell, ultimately, he lost his whole family. So, he is not about to trust people again. Also, this is further evidence that he is probably supporting himself through prostitution, as it seems implied that the way in which he was "taken" before, he now has no intention of "giving", though selling is not out of the question.
Mascara glass in the molar weeds
He's smoking crack, driven to it by memories of his mother's figurative abandonment, hence the stain of mascara on the glass. "Molar weeds" also rather implies his teeth are rotting, as is common among heroin addicts.
Her ash a serpent infancy
HER smoking (probably pot) is what led to his conception in the first place, as detailed below...
His eye patch pussed a gap of sand
His father's condom broke. His mother is described as dry, implying frigidity.
Into his shine a sedative
In the same way Miranda shoots his sedative of choice into his arm, his father shot his sperm in his mother, and the resulting conception had a sedating effect on his life. One would expect his father had married his mother and had put aside his youthful ways for a more serious life.
More and more the dirt collects
Things get worse and worse as time passes -- dirtier, messier, harder to sort out.
You'll never find her body now
Her closet festered in a secret air
Blonde underneath a blackened hair
Frances has lots of secrets. She conceals her blonde hair with dye, possibly (see below) to obscure the lack of likelihood that Miranda's ostensible father is his actual father. This is couched in the language of murder, which foreshadows the violent fantasy that is to come.
He never knew the colony gestated in his bed
The man Frances pegged as Miranda's father was completely unaware that "the colony" had slept with Frances, also, and that the resulting offspring could belong to any one of them. Interestingly, the coquis at the beginning of Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore, as well as the Caribbean associations of the name Miranda via Shakespeare, place Miranda's native land as Puerto Rico, which could be thought of as a colony of the United States. So, basically, this is to say he never knew the whole damn island was sleeping with her.
Mingle with the carnivores
You've something both in common now
This is spoken by the infamous "robot voice", which later shows up narrating the "lapdance" segment of Cassandra Geminni. I believe this voice represents something like Miranda's superego -- it is a ruthlessly honest and self-critical voice that tells him what is really going on, and warns him about patterns he is repeating. Here, it is basically telling him that as he has been raised by such aggressive, abusive people, he is now acting just like them, in abusing himself the same way by injecting himself with the very phallic needles and selling his butt on the street corners. This is something of a foreshadowing to his huge revelation later, that he has "become like one of the others."
Till one day his wasted breath
Swollen throat and karma debt
Set foot inside a parlor
To find her drunken by receipts
Now, as his superego has drawn him in parallel with the aggressive males of his family in the way he is treating himself, the "he" suddenly refers to Miranda. His breath is wasted, and his throat swollen, from talking so long with nobody listening or believing, and owing to the "blame the victim" vibes his family gives off, he is also driven by a sense of guilt over his own abuse. He walks into a parlor (which brings to mind "massage parlor", and further alludes to the fact that he thinks his mother is a whore, at least figuratively), and finds her drunken off of her ill-gotten gains. (Interesting that his mother is a whore, and so is Miranda, but he doesn't seem to see the connection). This drunkenness is a character point, identifying her as an alcoholic, and will be referenced in later songs.
He held her by the ankles
Gutted at the nave
Yes gutted and depraves
He tied a rope around her legs
And let her hang for seven days
Also interestingly, his attack against his mother has sexual overtones -- grabbing her by the ankles. He guts her at the "nave", which is appropriate to her status as his mother, and in so doing, he undoubtedly slices through her womb, as if severing her maternal connection to him. He repeats this, because he is rather astonished that he has enough wrath to imagine such a thing! He ties her up to hang and bleed to death, as a butcher would do to a pig, this drawing a connection between her and Miranda's abusers, past and present.
This never happened
But I saw you leave
And crawl into
A bed of broken windows
This never happened
This never happened, of course, is the classic incest denial. But, it's also just him saying he was only fantasizing about that last part, although she did abandon him ("I saw you leave") by failing to adequately protect him from the abuse, and by refusing to tell the truth when he finally "sang." She sleeps on broken glass, because her eyes (the windows of the soul) were destroyed by their mute, false witness., and she will never be able to sleep well ever again, knowing her guilt and culpability in what happened to him.
So, what is the "values message" here? Not quite understanding the question, I'm gonna have to go on and guess that it's some combination of the following:
A parent's loyalty should be to their child, and if that child is being abused, the parent needs to set aside their own personal allegiances and protect that child.
A child who gets up the courage to say that they are being abused should be believed, lest they wind up a homeless junky prostitute in some pit of a city as a consequence.
Apples never fall far from their trees, no matter how hard they try.
But, then, I may not understand the question, and those might not be value messages at all...
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