Lay your body down and tell me I am no Prince Hamlet

Crossfire [acoustic version]
Brandon Flowers

There’s a still in the street outside your window
And you’re keeping secrets on your pillow
Let me inside, no cause for alarm
I promise tonight not to do no harm
I promise you, babe, I won't do you no harm

And we're caught up in the crossfire
Of heaven and hell
And we’re searching for shelter

Lay your body down (3x)

Watching your dress as you turn down the light,
I forget all about the storm outside
Dark clouds rolled their way over town
Heartache and pain came a’ pouring down like
Hail, sleet, and rain, yeah, they're handing it out

And we're caught up in the crossfire
Of heaven and hell
And we’re searching for shelter

Lay your body down (6x)

Tell the devil that he can go back from where he came
His fiery arrows drew their bead in vain.
And when the hardest part is over we'll be here
And our dreams will break the boundaries of our fears
The boundaries of our fears

Lay your body down (6x)

Next to mine.

A man and woman suffer together “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as they are "caught up in the crossfire of heaven and hell." The universe is “at best indifferent, at worst hostile” and, despite the appearances of the moment, time does not stop for love (the "perfume and suppliance of a minute"). In the stillness of the night, in the calm before the crossfire resumes (the stillness is not a ceasefire, the devil is only drawing a bead), it seems as if “flesh is heir” only to “heart-ache” and “a thousand natural shocks.” This means (1) that man's inheritance condemns him to misfortune and (2) that man's own principle of motion is indistinguishable from that which moves the indifferent universe. Soon, out in the town, “heartache and pain [will] come pouring down” and this misfortune does not pause at the threshold (Thrift, thrift, Horatio!), even when visible only from the window.

The woman is “keeping secrets on [her] pillow,” wounds left by the devil's "fiery arrows." Like rumors spread in the crossfire, they speak of old hopes that have been dashed and of love that remains only in memory. They speak also of the agents of this misfortune: You, they say, and your husband. The aim is to destroy hope in repetition, in redemption, in "the promise of the resurrection of the body." The devil wants men to say: I, like things and events, only come to pass. Repetition, redemption, and eternity are only the ancient names of the wish that this be not so. Whatever created me has "distanced friend and lover from me." In the end, my company will be the darkness.

If not within the walls of a house, where is there shelter from this crossfire? "Lay your body down" is spoken again and again as the echo of man’s hope for a genuine shelter. Lay your body down, the man tells the woman, to recover from your wounds, to lie with me, to sleep, “perchance to dream.”

In the second verse, the man has forgotten all about the storm. The singer mocks the crossfire in an almost cavalier attitude: “Heartache and pain came a’ pouring down like / Hail, sleet, and rain, yeah, they're handing it out.” Why? What has happened? The woman touched her dress. She touches her dress and his “native simile [is] jarred.” The whole world’s native simile -- its principle of motion -- is jarred. Later, he tells her: I had to stop trying to persuade you to let me in. I say the same thing over and over and, though I know it is right, the saying of it -- or rather its rightness -- is not a shelter. Rightness is only a way to begin and beginning is only a way of waiting. For what? Not for a way to pretend there will be no misfortune or to promise that every emptiness of feeling can be avoided. What you have to do is wait for those other miracles that flesh is heir to. You touched your dress. I forgot everything. Everything was new. A shelter is where you wait for that miracle.

In the third verse a shelter has been found. It is not constructed in the stillness of inaction by the "dread of something after death," by dreams (and apparitions) from the “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” It does not imprison a love beyond that of “forty thousand brothers” so that such a love will produce nothing "subject to . . . birth." Instead, it is built up by the promise that "we'll be here" when the "hardest part is over." As they lay their bodies down, the lovers say: Let us suffer dreams together. When we wake up let us suffer the crossfire again and daydream that the appearance of the moment is not all.

"pray, love, remember"