[Chorus]

She don’t get the road. Thinks it’s a vacation
She don’t understand the road. Thinks it’s a vacation.
I don’t get the road, maybe it’s vacation.
I don’t understand the road, maybe it’s vacation.

[Verse One]

I could wear a blindfold, but I’d probably never ever go blind though.
Vision lives in lips when I grip a microphone. My stomach flinch
As I reach for the door handle.

I got fifteen seconds before I see her face.
Fifteen minutes walkin’ through my shallow pain.
Duckin’ fifteen minutes of fame I can’t explain
The fifteen years I been penning this shit for the stage.

I was on the road. Just got off the road to get back on the road. I feel the vertigo
Roll through my chest like memories funneled through a kaleidoscopes.

Just a day ago
She wrote me saying that “I miss your soul
I promise all I want to do is kick it though.
I know you know, we know, how all this goes,
But could we kick it for a minute, maybe visit though?


[Chorus]

She don’t get the road. Thinks it’s a vacation
She don’t understand the road. Thinks it’s a vacation.
I don’t get the road, maybe it’s vacation.
I don’t understand the road, maybe it’s vacation.

[Verse Two]

In the middle of America I study dreams.
I study myself with human beings.
Choose a college town in middle of America.
Follow now, as we step through the house (4)

Everybody keep your smiles loud
Use em’ to block out all the residue
Of sex, drug, child abuse, poverty, neglect, pseudo-democratic
Subterfuge—the power to silence these taboos
Is hinged on your power to be blinded (4)

Blow a smoke wit me. Keep smilin’.
Listen to this man wild ‘n
Blurting out obscenities
Read beneath the lines.
He wants his youth back he wants a co sign
He’s full of shit and he’s fifty-five (4)

I met him a year ago
At a benefit observing the politics
Of upper class white crowds
Look how this super nice guy turns super white loud.
Claiming that I want to fuck his wife.
At the bar. I want to punch his fucking lights out!

[Extended Narrative]

You know this is too real to be real, but this is actually your life. Unbelievable as it happens before you, like this, walking-down a high way at night in the rain with this middle aged man enraged and refusing to get in his wife’s car.

No one is too old to have an identity crisis you realize. You walk with this man
for miles as he spews his frustrations with life like a frat boy trying to win a puking contest. Until finally he cramps up and literally falls into your arms, asks you to call his wife and tell her to come back and take him home. Another semi screams past you like a 747 mist machine.

Somehow all of his weak body matches the weak, greedy, child inside of him
that cant help but smell gasoline on everything, especially you.

You are cloaked in your own heartbreak. It’s amazing how watching someone else’s suffering can momentarily relieve you of your own.

Tomorrow you will watch the game at his home, awkwardly with his wife.
Just one more night until your back on the road. You are far from home now. The heartache sings its truest notes when you think of her back home, how she is the only one who has ever brought you there, home, closest to your heart and its sutured features.