He reuses the verse melody from the previous album's "Dirty Little Religion", the topics of the verses are all over the place, and he packs too many words into one line (goes to show...) and too few in another (it's pretty hard to find), and rhymes "Henley Regatta" with "Persona non grata", but gets away with it all as only he could.
All of the prisoners serving life sentences
Wait for the earth to suddenly shake
For the walls to somehow suddenly come crumbling, tumbling and
For the bars to somehow magically break
Aw, there's nothing wrong with them
That a thousand bucks can't fix
That a thousand arms can't hold down
In the ground they're tattooing the stones with
cusses like cavemen - your momma was here
But they want to run through the air with no barriers or obstacles
Gunmen or guard dogs or priests
And to rise from the mud and start over and over
With the people all dead.
If Hans Christian Andersen could've had his way with me
Then none of this shit would have ever gone down
In my cell I'm tattooing myself with
Mermaids and swallows and though I do swallow
My mama thinks I'm grown but I'm really just little
And someday I will remember
Someday I will remember
Someday I will remember
Wait for the earth to suddenly shake
For the walls to somehow suddenly come crumbling, tumbling and
For the bars to somehow magically break
Aw, there's nothing wrong with them
That a thousand bucks can't fix
That a thousand arms can't hold down
In the ground they're tattooing the stones with
cusses like cavemen - your momma was here
But they want to run through the air with no barriers or obstacles
Gunmen or guard dogs or priests
And to rise from the mud and start over and over
With the people all dead.
If Hans Christian Andersen could've had his way with me
Then none of this shit would have ever gone down
In my cell I'm tattooing myself with
Mermaids and swallows and though I do swallow
My mama thinks I'm grown but I'm really just little
And someday I will remember
Someday I will remember
Someday I will remember
Lyrics submitted by tasteslikeG0LD
Prisoners Lyrics as written by Regina Spektor
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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I think listenrepeat makes a few good points...but it only explains part of the HCA reference. It doesn't help explain the rest, like "someday I will remember," "my mama thinks I'm grown but I'm really just little," and "but they want to run through the air...and to rise from the mud and start over and over with the people all dead." No matter how you look at it, you can't turn those lines into sexual frustration.
While I'm sure the character(s) Regina's portraying is/are sexually frustrated, but there's a lot more to it than that. I feel it's trying to portray the overall feelings of a prisoner--be it a literal or metaphorical one--and that's a lot more than just a sexual starvation. The isolation, the attitudes, the unfulfilled dreams, the desires, and the overall conditions of the prisoners.