I live in a world declared dead in a photograph taken in 1965
Where dreams and drums and a road-mapped knapsack
Combine in the poetry and music of
Being alive.

I speak in a strange dialect, so rarely heard
Unfathomable behind media screams
The truth obscured by the dust of the herd
And black and white fortunes from traded-in dreams
are clogging our senses for things in-between

Yet, it is not a country of corpses I see
in the Coffee-houses
Bookstores
Soup-lines
And Bars.
I see tangles and briars of arches and spires
Built from the ashes constructed from scars.
There are stars in the night burning poetry
400 octane American schemes
Casting bright shadows from soul onto soul
Destroying the stalls where Freedom is sold.

And coast to coast, they're at it tonight...
In jail cells, in tenements, and down on Skid Row
They're charting the course we soon will all follow
Adrift no longer, on sure, steady, keel
Ambitions seaworthy and anchored of steel
It's REAL!

The words and the rythms that flow here today
Are vital and needed in the truest of ways
Chipping away
Laws written in clay
A drunken ballet
No way left to pay

Hitchhiking down a million Folkways
From a room at the
Hobohemia YMCA