You took a ride
From a stranger
Driving a flower child van
And you never came back,
Lost in dead dreams,
Long gone ideals,
Wearing a
Psychedelic trip for a shirt
And dirt rubbed jeans teared knee to knee,
The wind blowing
And the radio playing some Dylan song,
Screaming and laughing,
The days were sand castles
On a beach being blown and
Losing shape, back to single grains,
And you promised that you'd never go back
But someplace in the back of your mind
You admitted to yourself that things
Like this, of smiles and bright eyes,
Never last, never last,
But that didn't stop you
And the highway stretched
And the clock ticked ticked
And the seconds were minutes
And the minutes hours,
A paper tablet for every normal thought
Worked like magic, medicine for the spirit,
Just like those that came before you,
All those people that smiled once,
Refusing to get behind a cubicle,
Refusing to wear a suit,
Refusing to get old,
You rode that van to the edge
(Of civilization) and watched the sun
Settle down up close, face to face,
And some time in between
It all stopped
And you were
Ancient history,
The psychedelic shirt lay in a chest,
The jeans in the back of a garbage truck,
The radio stopped playing Dylan,
The wind stopped blowing,
The castles were a hill of sand again,
Nobody screamed, nobody laughed,
you can try to run
But time always gets you,
No amount of pink and green tablets
Will save you
And peace will be but a teenage dream,
And the you that never came back
Did not come back,
But not because the van kept driving,
But because the van broke down forever,
Nothing lasts forever, nothing,
Especially you.