Hard whiskey made my dad beat me
Joe camel made my mother smoke
Silicone women made me download viruses
Black people made me racist
Poor people made me arrogant
Capitalism made me give my life to the dollar
A flawed education system made me not pay attention in class
A society based in patriarchal and hormonal driven narratives made me **** her
Daytime television and nightly news made me paranoid
Stereotypes made me leave my wife and kids
The quiet kid made me make him shoot up the school
God made me detonate the bomb

I was chasing down the moon
Burning concave, sickle bow ahead

They thought you were cheese
They praised you
They feared you
They studied you
They tried to lasso you
They landed on you
They forgot you

And now I'm staring you down
Plain and laid in my sights
The deer to my lonesome, vague headlights

As I barrel into her labyrinth
I'm yielding onto her, and as I go
She eclipses the sky beneath her
And it's shrinking in my view

It's as so the distance
Barring us both,
Is fracturing with every inch of every mile
By time, we will collide in beautiful unison

The explosion wound send to fragments,
The line dividing
The candor of life
And the uncertain ether

Celestial dust and shrapnel
Will rain down a new gravity

Heaven involved itself;
Instead I am now driving with the moon
We team south as she occupies
The passenger side

She's my hitch hiker
Or if she were Bonnie
I'd have to be Clyde
We're gonna rob that big bank in the sky, baby

Weaving stories of home and the road
And love and loss and time and hope
And destinations and longings
And belongings and beginnings

And we disagree and we fear things
And we share dreams and we lose sleep
And we split gas and we drive fast
And we smoke grass and she laughs

But time passed
And she was due a few miles ahead
So she climbed to the back seat
To rest for a moment

And I drove on
With the familiarity she shone
She was quiet now
And so I kept to my thoughts and the road

I'd look back on occasion just to assure
She was still a pendant on the drapery of night
I glanced about enough to spot her
From the corner of my eye

And I sigh at the strike of reticence
But flood with saccharine
I remember her glow as a child
She was in a sidecar on every road trip

Again I turn to her,
But she made no appearance
Like a thief, she fled by window,
Not even a disturbance to the wind

I smiled for our ride together
And the protection she laid over me
It was finished now,
But everything always is

I caught the blemish in my rear view
As I moved on
She was a speckle behind me
And being swallowed by the hills and buildings

I couldn't know what anticipated in the remote
But I remember my old friend
As the slack between us
Became taut and expansive

I learned to love more
and trust less.

Those two do not parallel.

I learned that people change
as do intentions.

But that doesn't minimize the importance of what's made.

I learned the good in selfishness
and the goodness in self.

I have you to thank.