Audio:

You can’t get there from here though you can go a lot of places
In the switchyard of the mind you can rearrange a lot of faces
But the scent of her hair and the touch of her lips and the curse of her tongue
Say you’ll bleed from your eyes till the day you’re done

When the plains’ red dawns stretch out like lies
And the cut glass of the past gives you spider web eyes
And you feel like you’re crawling through the land of the dead
And know the dream of your life should have stayed home in bed

And you don’t wanna do what beauty asks
Though she’s always there in the mirror’s masks
Jean Genet in the role of town crier
Or the vagabond king disguised as vampire

Or the ragamuffin boy who could be anyone
Hank or Woody or the scourge of the sun
Deranging the world to see for the first time
Mississippi was a state of mind
And Desolation just a street sign

You can’t get there from here though you jump through hoops
You can dance on the clouds or you can deal from the stoops
Your mama had a sister her sister had a friend
She wanted to bust out he wanted to keep it in
And a baby’s cry is the willow’s wind
You can’t even pray without some kind of sin

Walk down the backstairs slip off in the dark
The devil’s face is Joan of Arc’s
We might be 40 miles outside of somewhere
But the locals say you can’t get there from here

Smoke’s been travelin’ all through the swamps
Says the trees have been whisperin’ the words of Mein Kampf
Innocence cries in even the darkest heart
You can die for a rose or you can die for art
And all kinds of things that were wrong from the start

I got a woman behind my door
Says she’ll love me but I gotta be poor
Gotta crawl on my knees gotta howl like a dog
But if I’m a prince she’ll make me a frog

You can’t get there from here though you toss and you turn
And your dreams get heavy and your eyes start to burn
But there’s a place you can get to on down the road
Where lying’s just another kind of truth in code

And an old man playing a Chinese flute
Says I’ve had mine you can take the loot
The white beard of nothingness grows from my chin
And the next time we meet we’ll all be kin

There’s a place I go about a mile from here
Where I take off my face and examine my fear
The lake shines like a mirror and I cup my ear
And nothing much matters but that the words are clear

There are freight cars passing and old crossroads
And dispossessed creeds and broken codes
And dead end dreams where a life implodes
And sometimes you see her dancing in fire
But you can’t sing her back from the land of desire

You can bray like a donkey you can caw like a crow
There are some kinds of places words can’t go
He went down in the valley to sing his song
And let the echo decide if he was right or wrong

He let the echo decide if he was right or wrong