NEW INSPIRATION

This is for the heroes
Broken or unsung
Who did with their lives
What no-one else has done

This song was inspired
By The Passion of Joan of Arc
The death of Van Gogh
And Mott The Hoople

And I dedicate this song
To the memory
Of the great silent film actress
Marie Falconetti   

Jackie hit the streets
When she was thirteen years old
Shattered and abandoned
Stranded in the cold

Then with the whores on Pacific Avenue
They didn’t tell her everything
But they got her through
To a new inspiration to carry on 

By all accounts a loser
She never kept a friend
Save a doting brother
Who was faithful to the end

Still she was a poet
She was a chosen one  
So she gave it all away
Beneath the summer sun  
For a new inspiration to carry on 

They saw she was an outlaw
They said that wouldn’t do
There was no kind of suffering
They didn’t put her through

Like guards they spat upon her
Like judges they leered
But they couldn’t really touch her
Cause she never let them near
Her new inspiration to carry on  

A new inspiration, a new inspiration
A new inspiration to carry on 

Deep in pain beyond restraint
She chose a brutal code
To save her soul she took at last
To living on the road

When pain was not enough
And nothing else sufficed
She took a chance on love
Like she was rolling dice  
For a new inspiration to carry on 

In the juke joint country
In the honky-tonks
She had more men and women
Than she could ever want

But stricken by dark demons
She never knew herself
Till a stranger’s act of kindness
Changed the hollow way she felt  
For a new inspiration to carry on 

A new inspiration, a new inspiration
A new inspiration to carry on