Like a Springsteen Song

Shake off the dirt; smear this dust on my cheeks

Sit up from these porch-brick steps and take a chance over these wheels

Like a Springsteen song off and gone

See yesterday streaking a motorcycle in the morrow 

The fog and broken ghosts can dance with the skeletons of rust

Memories of almost dreams and slipping-satchel love

Letters mailed in the post and lost before the box

Who knows what was intended if an honest man cannot pick the lock? 

Stranded outside with the pony-boys drinking bottles of beer in the ally

Joking about factory jobs and what it was like being married

The baby never born and the promises of time

The assumptions of mornings and the realities of stop signs  

Facing a man at midnight, red-faced, stoic and cold

Frost out his breath and realizing the moment a man becomes old

The firmness of his back, the hesitation in his grip looking out into the darkness

And seeing life slip as if more is over than will come to be  

A bitter ounce to swallow, sterile in the whisky, the last sip of the night and the years

Piled up like tar in the lungs or shrapnel in the knee only so many more repetitions

Before a man quits counting because the only hope he has left is that the tallyman forgets

The numbers like racers around the track as if the man who got lapped  

Might have just been in the lead if the rest of the world could be blocked out

And the arbiter made blind to the repercussions and achievements of

A man doing the best he can to walk the line like a good soldier, an honest worker

Or a charismatic gentleman of the finest deportment money cannot buy  

What was learned on backstreets and alleyways had a home to abide

In the hearts of men who do not say much, keep to themselves with nods

Firm handshakes and grease smears on denim and callused knuckles

The currency of humility flooded in the financed poverty of effort over results  

Traded a sit-down discussion of nothing more to discuss

You me and however many sunsets left, come home with me

Let’s get out of here and break our bodies on the rocks as we ride by the shoreline

See the sphere explode upon the ocean as if we could ever afford a spot by the sand   

Take my hand and take me home, you be my tomorrow and I’ll be your unknown

The man you knew was practicing every day for this, to break out of prison to be fit

For the burdens to appreciate grace, to accept the promised-land in the love of this stage

To hell with being alive if that was all there is,

I will risk the price a man has to pay to get up on that hill and die trying to live 

To stare down the locomotive barreling towards my home

Some man builds it and the world revs up to knock it down

Some man builds it and the world revs up to knock it down  

Get back up and go another round, and another, and another

Until a life is spent, cut loose and the bones the pretty ones can pick and choose

Cannot take them with me where the true things are found  

See the mansion on the hill see the homeless man under the interstate

See the dry lightning over the fire, praying hands over an empty plate

The river of death with no way back,

A crucifix and a paycheck with nothing left after the tithe and the tax 

Miracles and ruins and deaths to hometowns

Leaky roofs and missing men answering back with lonesome sounds

Used cars and zeros, miles stolen and prison bars

Pregnant beauty queens, smoke stacks and wrecking balls   

A train of roustabouts and orphans, the poor heroes of the New Testament

Lined up in a welfare line that’s handing out labor, work to be done

A common people trying to cross a border without a gun pointed at their backs

Trade anything for a purpose other than a burden to wash this danger  

Out the onlookers eyes the fear of another cloaked in the disguise

Of a dead man walking in unwashed clothes bumming for a chance to find a new roll

Of the dice on an Atlantic City boardwalk, tell me what you need and I’ll feed your hungry heart

With a guilty man repenting with hands washing the floor, changing the man  

I can be a ghost of who I use to be, rising in new skin, a brilliant disguise

Of who my mother always wanted me to be

Out of the rubble and into the fire, nothing can hurt me now

My wife ran away, can’t see my child, love sits like a noose or a bus ticket  

Got to get out or there will be nothing left

This town is a jungle and everything dies, clawing to cross

See who I use to be and it has all been lost  

Something in the night, angels in the city

Got to move on, shuffle the step find my easy street before I forget

There is a reason to believe, we are alive.