A strummed electric guitar opens alone; a second threads in near 0:16, and light percussion gathers into a slow, swaying beat by about 0:40. The section establishes the two-chord rocking figure and hands it, still unhurried, to the voice.

The vocal enters around 0:50, half-spoken — I don't know just where I'm going. The band tightens through the for the kingdom line; by I feel just like Jesus' son (1:34) the tempo has become a gallop, the doubled And I guess that I just don't know rides the crest, and around 1:45 everything drops back to the opening sway.

I have made the big decision restarts the slow roll, and the identical climb runs again through the blood-and-dropper lines. The fast crest and drop land around 2:29–2:30; after that, you can't help me, not you guys, the all you sweet girls line, and the doubled refrain sit in a quieter, slackened passage leading toward the next verse. The job here is repetition with a local collapse placed before the verse has fully emptied out.

Voice low over sparse strum, I wish that I was born a thousand years ago opens the sailor fantasy — the lyric's longest step away from the drug and the city. The band re-enters beneath it and the tempo creeps upward through the verse; the refrain at 4:03 already sits on a moving beat, and an instrumental stretch runs on to 4:21.

The title appears only now — Heroin, be the death of me — and from here the accelerando is never answered: it's my wife and it's my life, an instrumental stretch, the first when the smack begins to flow catalog at 5:16, a second at 6:05, the thank-God lines from 6:20, the final doubled refrain at 6:35. Speed and density keep climbing where the first two frenzies were each followed by quiet.

The lyric ends at 6:39; the band does not. Thirty-odd seconds of instrumental gallop at the track's fastest, then a dead stop near 7:08 — no slowdown, no return to the opening sway. The collapse the pattern kept setting up never arrives; the song ends inside its own surge.