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Desperado, you ain't gettin no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they're driving you home
And freedom? Oh, freedom
Well that's just some people talkin
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

And don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won't snow, the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losing all your highs and lows
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences and open the gate
It may be rainin, but there's a rainbow above you
You better let somebody love you
Before it's too late.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing or understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange the annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

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