| I won’t have money and I won’t stop, no I’ll keep on moving until I drop
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| for my face is god-like beauty… let loose on the land of the free
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| and with speed my spiritual duty… no one will ever know me
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| I’ll stay alive as long as I drive, on the road, man, that’s where I thrive
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| that’s where I run from who I am, a beautiful blur ever on the lam
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| I’m hooked on speed and what I need is an epic land where the highways feed
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| my eyes and my ears… and a bottomless hunger for grinding gears,
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| my lies and my fears… there outing squares and scouting queers
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| rolling out its long and spreading its wide and giving me the room I need to
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| hide
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| in the beat where I seek to reap what I sow in uprooted, fleet-footed frolic
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| and flow…
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| with the wind, hear it blow… me from Mudville to Missoula
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| across the infinite ocean face of America, America
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| my country 'tis on thee my race 'gainst the li’l yankee-québéquois —
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| running from place to place to place, from 'tit Jean-Louis le petit-bourgeois
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| with a golden man pretty as a goddamn painting popping off at the wheel
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| and a girl slash leech there faintly fainting or buzzed and copping a feel
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| and whoosh! |
| wham! |
| and wow! |
| goes the road, a snaking river wonder to behold
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| a Mississippi move cutting a groove from Boise to Mobile
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| Oh the road where I was ranger Dan, a shiftless Joe, a Navy man
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| where I was a New York digger digging for who the hell I am
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| until I threw in the towel and just cut and ran… and ran… and ran…
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| from Lawrence to Loredo to Lala land, from Walla Walla to the Hoover Dam…
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| and rode… and drove… and about me I still don’t know…
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| and let it show that I gave up looking a long long time ago
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| gave up looking to blow my cover and splash my real all over my other
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| gave up looking and road the road, the road where I could roll…
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| and roll… writing that roll rolling under the Underwood keys
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| spewing out mass quantities, line after line of assorted me’s,
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| black teeth biting into that paper to etch the words of my icon-maker —
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| yeah I came to California with a typewriter on my knees
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| All the way running from Lowell, Mass, and oh baby, what a gas!
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| But that too had to pass when the bennies were gone and the booze went wrong
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| and laughing it off made the gallery queasy and Neal ran off to drive for Ken
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| Kesey
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| and the road gets hard when the words don’t come, come so goddamn easy…
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| And I vote Republican and talk up the road to another television sleazy
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| awatching my face get bigger and bloated awondering whither my beauty floated —
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| my beauty behind me like so much dust on a Sonora side road in the dusk
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| rolling away from a pit stop riven, riven with want and lust —
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| LUST for the road and LUST for sensation, LUST wolfing down every mile in the
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| nation
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| that’s the pill and that’s the elation, that’s the motion intoxication
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| that comes from fuel in the machine, man we fly so high we have to scream,
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| we roll and roll till we take flight into the star-spangled bang up black and
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| blue… night
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| The road sucking us dry, the reds sucking us white…
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| till we’re there and gone like quicksilver, God… long gone outta sight. |