Well the Maximum Lawmen run down Flamingo
Chasing the Rat and the barefoot girl
And the kids round here look just like shadows
A lways quiet, holding hands
From the churches to the jails
T onight all is silence in the world
As we take our stand down in Jungleland

The midnight gang's assembled
And picked a rendezvous for the night
They'll meet `neath that giant Exxon sign
That brings this fair city light
Man there's an opera out on the Turnpike
There's a ballet being fought out in the alley
Until the local cops, Cherry Tops,
Rips this holy night
The street's alive as secret debts are paid
Contacts made, they vanished unseen
Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades
Hustling for the record machine
The hungry and the hunted explode into
rock'n'roll bands
That face off against each other out in the street
Down in Jungleland

In the parking lot the visionaries dress in the latest rage
Inside the backstreet girls are dancing
To the records that the D.J. plays
Lonely-hearted lovers struggle in dark corners
Desperate as the night moves on,
Just a look and a whisper, and they're gone

Beneath the city two hearts beat
Soul engines running through a night so tender
In a bedroom locked
In whispers of soft refusal and then surrender
In the tunnels uptown
The Rat's own dream guns him down
A s shots echo down them hallways in the night
No one watches when the ambulance pulls away
Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between what's flesh and what's fantasy
And the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all,
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night
They reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded,
Not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland