| I met a friend of spirit
|
| He drank and womanized
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| And I sat before his sanity
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| I was holding back from crying
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| He saw my complications
|
| And he mirrored me back simplified
|
| And we laughed how our perfection
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| Would always be denied
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| «Heart and humor and humility»
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| He said «Will lighten up your heavy load»
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| I left him for the refuge of the roads
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| I fell in with some drifters
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| Cast upon a beachtown
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| Winn Dixie cold cuts and highway hand me downs
|
| And I wound up fixing dinner
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| For them and Boston Jim
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| I well up with affection
|
| Thinking back down the roads to then
|
| The nets were overflowing
|
| In the Gulf of Mexico
|
| They were overflowing in the refuge of the roads
|
| There was spring along the ditches
|
| There were good times in the cities
|
| Oh radiant happiness
|
| It was all so light and easy
|
| Till I started analyzing
|
| And I brought on my old ways
|
| A thunderhead of judgment was
|
| Gathering in my gaze
|
| And it made most people nervous
|
| They just didn’t want to know
|
| What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads
|
| I pulled off into a forest
|
| Crickets clicking in the ferns
|
| Like a wheel of fortune
|
| I heard my fate turn turn turn
|
| And I went running down a white sand road
|
| I was running like a white-assed deer
|
| Running to lose the blues
|
| To the innocence in here
|
| These are the clouds of Michelangelo
|
| Muscular with gods and sungold
|
| Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads
|
| In a highway service station
|
| Over the month of June
|
| Was a photograph of the earth
|
| Taken coming back from the moon
|
| And you couldn’t see a city
|
| On that marbled bowling ball
|
| Or a forest or a highway
|
| Or me here least of all
|
| You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
|
| Or this baggage overload
|
| Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads |