The Highway Song

I never could stand to drink that blood and call it wine.

I never did accept their wars and call them mine.

So I took to the highway never to look back.

From the Back Bay of Boston to San Francisco Bay

It was Highway 1 going south down to LA

Outside of Bakersfield I hitched a ride to Santa Fe.

I made it to Baton Rouge and met a Cajun lady with a Persian cat

We spent the night in Circe’s ingle, in a houseboat on a raft.

I hopped a freight train outside of Mobile go’n north to Cincinnati.

Rode a boxcar with some hobos who’d been shift’n since Korea

They knew to jump off our wagon-lit from the doors in back

I jump out the front on the wrong side of the track.

That railroad inspector grabbed me and landed such a whack

He dumped out all the contents of my pack:

Norman Mailer in Chicago, James Joyce and Ulysses on the run.

Said his daughter had run away with someone called a bum.

He showed me her photo; nowhere to be found

I said I didn’t know her, that I was new in town.

He stood there look’n hard at me as I hit the ground.

The big man started shak’n, said boy you best be gone.

So I grabbed my belongins, which didn’t take me long.

The only thing I knew how to do was too keep on keep’n on.