Quicksilver

I won’t have money and I won’t stop, no I’ll keep on moving until I drop

For my face is God-like beauty... Let loose on the land of the free

And with speed my spiritual duty... No one will ever know me

I’ll stay alive as long as I drive, on the road, man, that’s where I thrive

That’s where I run from who I am, a beautiful blur ever on the lam

I’m hooked on speed and what I need is an epic land where the highways feed

My eyes and my ears... And a bottomless hunger for grinding gears

My lies and my fears... There outing squares and scouting queers

Rolling out its long and spreading its wide and giving me the room I need to hide

In the beat where I seek to reap what I sow in uprooted, fleet-footed frolic and flow

With the wind, hear it blow... Me from mudville to missoula

Across the infinite ocean face of america, america

My country ‘tis on thee my race ‘gainst the li’l yankee-québéquois –

Running from place to place to place, from ‘tit jean-louis le petit-bourgeois

With a golden man pretty as a goddamn painting popping off at the wheel

And a girl slash leech there faintly fainting or buzzed and copping a feel

And whoosh! Wham! And wow! Goes the road, a snaking river wonder to behold

A mississippi move cutting a groove from boise to mobile

Oh the road where I was ranger dan, a shiftless joe, a navy man

Where I was a new york digger digging for who the hell I am

Until I threw in the towel and just cut and ran... And ran... And ran

From lawrence to loredo to lala land, from walla walla to the hoover dam

And rode... And drove... And about me I still don’t know

And let it show that I gave up looking a long long time ago

Gave up looking to blow my cover and splash my real all over my other

Gave up looking and road the road, the road where I could roll

And roll... Writing that roll rolling under the underwood keys

Spewing out mass quantities, line after line of assorted me’s

Black teeth biting into that paper to etch the words of my icon-maker –

Yeah I came to california with a typewriter on my knees

All the way running from lowell, mass, and oh baby, what a gas!

But that too had to pass when the bennies were gone and the booze went wrong

And laughing it off made the gallery queasy and neal ran off to drive for ken kesey

And the road gets hard when the words don’t come, come so goddamn easy

And I vote republican and talk up the road to another television sleazy

Awatching my face get bigger and bloated awondering whither my beauty floated –

My beauty behind me like so much dust on a sonora side road in the dusk

Rolling away from a pit stop riven, riven with want and lust –

Lust for the road and lust for sensation, lust wolfing down every mile in the nation

That’s the pill and that’s the elation, that’s the motion intoxication

That comes from fuel in the machine, man we fly so high we have to scream

We roll and roll till we take flight into the star-spangled bang up black and blue... Night

The road sucking us dry, the reds sucking us white

Till we’re there and gone like quicksilver, God... Long gone outta sight