| Raise your can of beer on high
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| And seal your fate forever
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| Our best years have past us by
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| The golden age of leather
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| This was the night not long to come in the year of our Lord A.D.
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| Where in a desert way-house, poised on the brink of eternity
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| Four and ninety studded horsemen closed the knot of honor
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| As only drunken soldiers can
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| And passed from man to man, a wanton child to dead to care
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| That each would find his pleasure as he might
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| For this fantastic night was billed as nothing less than the end of
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| An age
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| A last crusade, a final outrage, in this day of flacid plumage
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| And there was worn no cloth but leather
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| Made supple by years of stinging cinders
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| And here were seen the scars of age
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| For age had been the common call for one last night together
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| Down colored the sky (the ritual feast)
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| Some had died (they were buried with their bikes)
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| Each grabbed a rag (from a man with a sack)
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| Torn strips of color (the red and the black)
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| We made a vow to give it all we had to give
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| We made a vow to die as we had lived
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| They flew the colors, they began to fight
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| They flailed at each other like bugs at a light
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| Bodies and bikes beyond repair
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| Smell of oil and gas in the air
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| Then the wind whipped the desert with a giant hand
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| And the humans and the Harleys caught the shifting sand
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| And the old ranger weathered the storm
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| And he topped the rise by the middle of morn
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| He saw rippled dunes, calm and surreal
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| And a glint of a shaft of chromium steel
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| Golden age… |