Scenes from Highways 1981-2009

I let the car drift some

Eye your uncomfortable pose in profile

The postures of long drives

That endless cycling of your numb and near sleeping parts

And you lean much harder than you need when the road curves

Swerve through traffic and the cracks in the ground

Every gesture you require of a drive like this night

When you fight now you just head out of town

I let the wheel go over center lines

Inside a place without time, a loop through history

Eye you in periphery now prone in the passenger seat

It’s a mystery the ways you can sleep

I want to leave here for where nobody goes

I want to breathe in the air of all those sprawling ancient spaces on earth

You said we’re so scared of alone and I knew what you meant

You want to go where it glows all those places where your watch doesn’t work

You were riding those nights on the highway

Always hiding out inside a songwriter’s dream there

Like a scene from a song, “born to run,” or maybe “running on empty”

Ones where they would leave

Certain nights when you’d fight you couldn’t stick around

So you’d head out of town

Just hit the highway and drive

Certain nights when you’d fight it was fine

But it shook you when the baby would cry

Why did you always turn around in the end?

To hear the shattering of glass on the door again?

So loud the baby couldn’t sleep anymore?

What didn’t you find that you were looking for?

Your mother called a hardware

Set you up an interview

An answer to an ad

The bosses’ daughter still remembers dinner where her father said

He wouldn’t stick his neck out for trouble again

But they did then

And those days you’d wake up and just decide you wouldn’t show

He’d show up at your door

Nights you’d skip town

He’d follow you out

Pretty soon you started falling for their daughter

And she fell for you

Drive roll every window down

Let the desert enter heavy and primitive in

Drift till rumble strips sound

Time moves so slow but I know that you meant what you said

You want to go where it’s frozen

All those places where the highways don’t reach

You want to go where it glows

Somewhere that time is irrelevant

You want to go where it glows

Somewhere the spaces are infinite

You want to go where it glows

Somewhere you don’t feel the hours pass by

You identified the flowers on the road

I rolled the windows down and shut off the radio

Did you ever think you’d end up here

All those late nights you spent driving alone?

You were riding to hide or you were looking for a brand new life

Did you ever think you’d find one back home?

Did you even think you’d get out alive?

Could you imagine then the love you now know?

I think history’s a system of roads and there’s nowhere it doesn’t go

I pulled over to the side and felt no time

Off the highway with the landscape aglow

Still not sure what we were trying to find

I only know we went home