Along indian summer stretches
Of orange highways west
The sunbeams dancing to slient songs
Of memory and disappointment
Kiss the ground, all the stories it owns
In tangled, rusted arms.
Desperation is something different.
Our dignified dreams of dying young.

Lonelyness is a Sunday afternoon
with no sun and less to do.
A dream of you I can't get back into
Lost to air and split in two.
Against indian summer stretches
I'll fall into cynical sleep.
Hope slips away through the same-old days
And lonelyness is this town's name

A thousand tired offramps
Across the richest country in the world
Where gonowhere jobs and threedeckers
Seep into us like cheap alchoal.
Wait for escape in 4/4 time,
In the town where you were born
Where everyone is sad and proud
By the time they're twenty-four.

Clutching a beer and a few hopes
With dirty fingernails.