"Beijing is all about getting out of this American head and realizing there's life beyond the Mid West or San Francisco.There's thousands of years of culture in the East and we can't get our minds around it. ... If there's a war on they've already won and a billion militia in hunter's orange carrying Bibles can't keep 'em away. Communism was a passing footnote in their history. They live in the shamanistic desert and will shake herbs above my head and bury me in the Lone Star ... She falls and shatters like a porcelin statuette broken into bits and the Brooklyn hipsters running from God and their parents can't put her together again. In Beijing, there's a scared student with headphones on listening to a techno chant in a trance ... a cry ... a rhapsody or 4 notes a fourth from home and thinking the next bullet is for her. There's a stream of mind speak, a river we can tap into or drown in -- either way there is water and a wall and a choking metropolis -- a country of men and women; All children of a god we can't comprehend. They are singing soundscapes beyond our ears and above our eyes and I caught just a glimpse from a rooftop in Atlanta; to an airplane ride into sub heaven where I fear I remain a ghost flying above Beijing."

On the flight there
I was throwing up and shaking
Finally crying,
and my Father he was payin’
 
On your balcony
We talked about Atlanta
And conditions
The heart no longer mattered
 
Chorus:
Beijing
I heard you were listening to this song
I was wrong about everything
I heard they were listening, heard that they were listening
 
Hey Laura,
I heard you could save me
Your biography said you were such a lady

  Like a shaman
You take me
Outside on the prairie
Shake herbs above my head
in the Lone Star, I’d be buried
 
Chorus

I heard they were listening

  With your red lips
And a tattoo of the devil
Some kind of Anti-christ
Your husband’s made of metal
 
In Brooklyn
With his tape deck
His blonde hair and black eyeliner
And the preachers with their evil
and their talk about red China
 
Chorus 2x
 
In a disco tech
Your hands were made of paper
And his eyes were on your legs
Like a man on a skyscraper
 
And you fell down
And you passed out
And your face was made of porcelain
 
And it broke off
And shattered
Your tears were acid scorching
And a student
With his head phones
In a closet with a red light
he blew his eyes out like a rocket
Stumbled in the moonlight
 
Chorus 2x