Earworm "Dead Flowers"

Earworms are song tunes that repeat in the mind even when the music has not been played or has long ceased to play on any device. Often I awaken with a song in my mind that tends to play and replay throughout my morning ablutions and coffee preparations. Sometimes the song plays even at the beginnings of my writing day. I attribute the presence of the earworm to its situation as the sound track to my dreaming.  I have been thinking (!) that I might track the particular worm and see what it might say about my dream and my life
     Last night’s worm was the song “Dead Flowers” from the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. This is not a happy song: Susie is a seemingly upper-class woman sitting in her silk upholstered chair conversing with rich folk while the narrator hangs out with his “ragged company.” Susie rides in her rose-pink Cadillac on Kentucky Derby day while the narrator shoots up heroin in a basement room. Yet he demands that Susie take him down, and I am wondering where ‘down’ might be here:

Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave

     To the fellow getting high in the basement, Susie is a phony: she thinks she is the queen of the underground—of the denizens of the underworld--but it is really he who is the one in the underground basement while she parades in luxury up on the street. At the moment he is the lord of the underground. And this earworm reminds me of Miss Lonely in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone:” Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?/People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’/You thought they were all kiddin’ you.” She was once haughty and contemptuous, and now she has fallen low, even perhaps into the underground. In “Dead Flowers” “down’ appears to means “up:” the narrator asks to be raised up to respectability by this phony queen of the underground. He asks that she send him dead flowers, once that were beautiful but now dear are meaningless, ugly and lifeless. I suspect those dead flowers would come from her home where the flowers have since died. I think that his request is meant as an insult. But he will put roses on her grave: despite his drug addiction he will survive, but her . . . well it would seem not!
     So I’m wondering why this earworm occupied my dream world. I wonder if the appearance in the dream of a long-time friend who suddenly broke off communication with me without explanation accounts for the worm. The song defines the end of our relationship and my feelings concerning the break-up. There is anger in the charge to “Take me down,” and in the biting condescension explicit in the promise that despite Susie’s stature it is the narrator who will marry and thrive enough to send roses for her grave. The anger in the vow to put flowers on her grave is palpable. Sometimes I have considered that anger serves as a mask for fear, but as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so sometimes anger is just anger.
     And Susie’s affectedness and insincerity remind me of the politicians who espouse their love for democracy as they strive to destroy it. They people my nightmares nightly. They can send us dead flowers every day by the US Mail and deliver dead flowers at our weddings, but finally we will celebrate their demise and with contempt put roses on their graves!