Sunday, December 6, 2009

Song notes... "Crossroads and Crucifixes"

The Gulf Coast rain pounds a rhythm in my mind. There are some times when the night drags on and on and weighs me down, when I suffocate and feel like breaking apart, that I miss those long pine tree miles. I could give everything up for a one-way ticket to anywhere, but instead I watch the ashtray fill up and contemplate my defeat. Will they expect me to give a speech? I won't. I have nothing left to say. No matter what I do tonight, tomorrow will still come, and I take no solace in that thought.

The world spins round and round, and I'm stuck on the Gulf. Or the desert. New Mexico put the Gulf in my eyes, and all you see is a projection, a reflection. How's that make you feel; falling in love with something no more real than the mirror stretched abstract between sea and sky? Blue cold and hard as slate, ice you'll never melt. Las Cruces changed my bones to pigiron, a metal frame to protect a soft heart, pumping rain and sand and steam.

Robert Johnson, where are you now, and where's your Devil? Where's that crazy man I met in Florida who claimed to have found your bottleneck slide, buried somewhere in the Mississippi mud? I need you here, poison in your whiskey, and dying howling like a dog. I'll break the dial off the radio and we'll be stuck with each other all the way to the Delta, just a couple of wide-eyed ghosts. And I'll drive into the soft spiderweb underbelly of the South, where the green and black all gives way through the junkie veins of swamp and moss to the glowing, nuclear Gulf. And we'll sink 'til we're breathing mud.

*roadmaps, red and blue veins against the grey of my mind

Crossroads and crucifixes
I fell in love with every waitress
From Brooklyn, NY back to Memphis
Nothing but crossroads and crucifixes

Crossroads and crucifixes
Traded my soul for a life less wasted
From New Mexico back to Memphis
Nothing but crossroads and crucifixes

Crossroads and crucifixes
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From the Emerald Coast back to Memphis
Nothing but crossroads and crucifixes

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