Last Man on Earth Lyrics
Hoisting my body up atop the charred debris
Who is that creature with the crazed look in his eyes?
Don't even question your senses
You can be sure that's me
When all the pretenders to your hand lie dead across the land,
I'll be the last man on earth
I'll be the last man on earth
I'll be the last man on earth
Crawling around, down on the ground
Just when your dungeon walls feel like they're closing in
Whose are those bloody knuckles reaching down to grab you
Just as the last of the light overhead is growing dim?
It was their love you wanted, not mine
But when they deny your name three times
I'll be the last man on earth
I'll be the last man on earth
I'll be the last man on earth
Crawling around, down on the ground
And I will bleed and I will drool
And the cameras will slow pan across my face
And I will try to say something cool
Raising their axes, howling like monkeys in the sun
Who will that guy be holding you so high above them?
You know and I know, everyone knows it, I'm the one
I may have failed you once before
But this right here, this means war
I'll be the last man on earth
I'll be the last man on earth
I'll be the last man on earth
Crawling around, down on the ground
This song is fucking badass.
That is all.
John has always had a really serious love affair with using Christian imagery from the Bible as literary lyrical metaphors for more real and mundane issues central to the human experience, i.e - love, hate, etc.
In this case, he's making a double entendre: a common statement of utter and total romantic disinterest is "not if you were the last man on earth". So, of course, John ties this in to Jesus, his betrayal, and his eventual return on Judgment Day as Messiah.
The result is something of the "don't count me out" trope expressed in a dualistic Christian context: no matter how long it takes for the day to come, or how many obstacles he must surmount, the narrator fantasizes about that "day of reckoning" when all the liars and falsehoods are stripped away, on which he will be able to say "Now that the liars are all gone, I tell you that I never denied you. I never left you. And I have always loved you" and that will simply be enough, when it was never that simple enough before.
John's also a smart dude, so I suspect he realizes that the whole thing is a sad, unlikely fantasy a la BNL's "Some Fantastic" or Henley's "Boys of Summer". What connotations that has for the zeal of John's belief in Christian doctrine remains to be seen.