Quicksilver

I won’t have money and I won’t stop, no I’ll keep on moving
 until I drop
For my face is God-like beauty... Let loose on the land of 
the free
And with speed my spiritual duty... No one will ever know 
me
I’ll stay alive as long as I drive, on the road, man, 
that’s where I thrive
That’s where I run from who I am, a beautiful blur ever on 
the lam

I’m hooked on speed and what I need is an epic land where 
the highways feed
My eyes and my ears... And a bottomless hunger for grinding
 gears
My lies and my fears... There outing squares and scouting 
queers
Rolling out its long and spreading its wide and giving me 
the room I need to hide
In the beat where I seek to reap what I sow in uprooted, 
fleet-footed frolic and flow

With the wind, hear it blow... Me from mudville to missoula
Across the infinite ocean face of america, america
My country ‘tis on thee my race ‘gainst the li’l 
yankee-québéquois –
Running from place to place to place, from ‘tit jean-louis 
le petit-bourgeois

With a golden man pretty as a goddamn painting popping off 
at the wheel
And a girl slash leech there faintly fainting or buzzed and
 copping a feel
And whoosh! Wham! And wow! Goes the road, a snaking river 
wonder to behold
A mississippi move cutting a groove from boise to mobile

Oh the road where I was ranger dan, a shiftless joe, a navy
 man
Where I was a new york digger digging for who the hell I am
Until I threw in the towel and just cut and ran... And 
ran... And ran
From lawrence to loredo to lala land, from walla walla to 
the hoover dam

And rode... And drove... And about me I still don’t know
And let it show that I gave up looking a long long time ago
Gave up looking to blow my cover and splash my real all 
over my other
Gave up looking and road the road, the road where I could 
roll

And roll... Writing that roll rolling under the underwood 
keys
Spewing out mass quantities, line after line of assorted 
me’s
Black teeth biting into that paper to etch the words of my 
icon-maker –
Yeah I came to california with a typewriter on my knees

All the way running from lowell, mass, and oh baby, what a 
gas!
But that too had to pass when the bennies were gone and the
 booze went wrong
And laughing it off made the gallery queasy and neal ran 
off to drive for ken kesey
And the road gets hard when the words don’t come, come so 
goddamn easy
And I vote republican and talk up the road to another 
television sleazy
Awatching my face get bigger and bloated awondering whither
 my beauty floated –
My beauty behind me like so much dust on a sonora side road
 in the dusk
Rolling away from a pit stop riven, riven with want and 
lust –
Lust for the road and lust for sensation, lust wolfing down
 every mile in the nation

That’s the pill and that’s the elation, that’s the motion 
intoxication
That comes from fuel in the machine, man we fly so high we 
have to scream
We roll and roll till we take flight into the star-spangled
 bang up black and blue... Night

The road sucking us dry, the reds sucking us white
Till we’re there and gone like quicksilver, God... Long 
gone outta sight