I rode down to the tracks
Thinking they might sing to me
But they just stared back
Broken, trainless and black as night
♪
Climbed out onto my roof
So I'd be a poet in the night
Beat the walls off my room
I saw the big room that is this life
This is my condition
Naked and hysterical
Reaching to grab a hand that I just slapped back at
This is my condition
Desperate, alone, without an excuse
I try to explain, Christ, what's the use?
♪
Read and I felt so small
Some words keep speaking when you close the book
Drank and just about smiled
Then I remembered us in that bed
♪
Put my ear to the door
I just heard hot rods and gunshots and sirens
People kill me these days
There's keys in their eyes but they lock from the inside
This is my condition
Naked and hysterical
Reaching to grab a hand that I just slapped back at
This is my condition
Desperate, alone, without an excuse
I try to explain, Christ, what's the use?
♪
"Everything is pouring in
The switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell
And I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine
Calling our mountains.
But it was that beautiful cut of clouds
I could always see above the little S.P. alley
Puffs floating by from Oakland
Or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south"
"The clarity of Cal to break your heart
♪
It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin' to do, ole Frisco"
"The street is loaded with darkness
♪
Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs
And blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of interior
The grime inside the word in mouths falling out tooth by tooth
The reading rooms tick tock bigclock
With creak chair and slantboards and old faces
Looking up over rimless spectacles
Bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liverpool England pawnshop long before I was born
And across rains they've come to the end of the land sadness end of the world
Gladness all you San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again"