The summer of twenty-two, the city's humid breath

I came back from the war and stared down my own death

Rented a cardboard bungalow in West Egg's morning light

Between two marble palaces of monumental might

And from my lawn, I saw him, a silhouette in blue

A man I didn't know, with a purpose strange and new.

His mansion was a fever dream on every weekend night

A supernova burning, impossibly bright

With champagne fountains flowing and a jazz band that would scream

And people came and went, lost inside a waking dream

They whispered of his history, a killer or a spy

But no one really knew the man, and no one questioned why.

One night I saw him standing, alone upon his pier

He wasn't looking at the stars, or anything that's near

He stretched a trembling hand out, across the darkened sound

As if to grasp a thing that could never be earthbound

A single, distant, emerald gleam, a harbor light so far

A future built on yesterday, beneath a lonely star.

Her name was Daisy, golden, with a voice just like a bell

A cousin from my richer life, caught in a wealthy hell

He'd loved her as a soldier, before he went away

And built his entire kingdom to win her back one day

I set the stage for them, a tea-soaked afternoon in June

And watched five years of waiting evaporate in one small room.

A summer filled with secrets, and whispers on the phone

He showed her all his riches, a world he'd built alone

He threw his colored shirts down, a rainbow in the air

And for a single moment, she almost seemed to care

He thought his money's magic could turn the clock right back

And put their broken story on its original track.

But you can't repeat the past, and Tom was not a fool

The confrontation waited, deliberate and cruel

In a suffocating hotel suite, the ugly truth laid bare

Her voice was full of money, and terror, and despair

She couldn't say the words he'd longed forever just to hear

And in that crushing silence, the dream just disappeared.

A yellow car, a cloud of dust in the valley of the ash

A woman running blindly, a sudden, sickening crash

A fatal misunderstanding, a lie to save a name

And a grieving, broken husband who had to find someone to blame

Tom pointed his clean finger across the bay's dark water

And sealed my neighbor's fate in the name of another man's daughter.

He waited for a phone call that he was never getting

While the autumn leaves were falling, and the lonely sun was setting

He died there in his swimming pool, a final, pointless show

The last dream of a dreamer, who had nowhere left to go

And no one came to mourn him, the parties were all done

Just me, his father, and the rain, beneath the hollow sun.

So we beat on, boats against the current

Borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Yeah, we beat on, boats against the current...

Borne back ceaselessly... into the past.