Scenes from Highways 1981-2009

I let the car drift some
Eye your uncomfortable pose in profile
The postures of long drives
That endless cycling of your numb and near sleeping parts

And you lean much harder than you need when the road curves
Swerve through traffic and the cracks in the ground
Every gesture you require of a drive like this night
When you fight now you just head out of town

I let the wheel go over center lines
Inside a place without time, a loop through history
Eye you in periphery now prone in the passenger seat
It’s a mystery the ways you can sleep

I want to leave here for where nobody goes
I want to breathe in the air of all those sprawling ancient spaces on earth
You said we’re so scared of alone and I knew what you meant
You want to go where it glows all those places where your watch doesn’t work

You were riding those nights on the highway
Always hiding out inside a songwriter’s dream there
Like a scene from a song, “born to run,” or maybe “running on empty”
Ones where they would leave

Certain nights when you’d fight you couldn’t stick around
So you’d head out of town
Just hit the highway and drive
Certain nights when you’d fight it was fine
But it shook you when the baby would cry

Why did you always turn around in the end?
To hear the shattering of glass on the door again?
So loud the baby couldn’t sleep anymore?
What didn’t you find that you were looking for?

Your mother called a hardware
Set you up an interview
An answer to an ad
The bosses’ daughter still remembers dinner where her father said
He wouldn’t stick his neck out for trouble again
But they did then
And those days you’d wake up and just decide you wouldn’t show
He’d show up at your door
Nights you’d skip town
He’d follow you out
Pretty soon you started falling for their daughter
And she fell for you

Drive roll every window down
Let the desert enter heavy and primitive in
Drift till rumble strips sound
Time moves so slow but I know that you meant what you said
You want to go where it’s frozen
All those places where the highways don’t reach

You want to go where it glows
Somewhere that time is irrelevant
You want to go where it glows
Somewhere the spaces are infinite

You want to go where it glows
Somewhere you don’t feel the hours pass by
You identified the flowers on the road
I rolled the windows down and shut off the radio

Did you ever think you’d end up here
All those late nights you spent driving alone?
You were riding to hide or you were looking for a brand new life
Did you ever think you’d find one back home?

Did you even think you’d get out alive?
Could you imagine then the love you now know?

I think history’s a system of roads and there’s nowhere it doesn’t go

I pulled over to the side and felt no time
Off the highway with the landscape aglow
Still not sure what we were trying to find
I only know we went home