As the winds grow stronger and the snow falls heavy,
as the oceans rise and pour over the levee,
as the sweltering heat makes us sleep in the day
and work in the night, I’ll take your hand and say:
Dance with me in the darkness, until the futile dawn;
sing while I play guitar, we don’t have long.
Read your poems to me while we have a little time;
we have no future, but we still have rhyme.
Let’s drink a toast, or two, to what might have been,
and what once was, before our time turned grim
Let’s plunder the pharmacy, or eat the magic mushroom;
don’t go into the night easy, but don’t rage at the moon.
Let’s savor all the moments, as our destiny arrives.
Let’s not waste another minute of our precious time alive.

Oh what have you done to your lovely hair,
streaking with insult those glorious strands ?
Of God-given beauty so unaware
that you've put it to death by other's hands.

Tinted with sorrow in a dying fall:
your sultry darks exchanged for tainted blonde—
a chemical crown, clueless overhaul;
false gold, a dull glory now gone beyond.

Liberate your lustrous locks, set them free
to gather grace and claim their natural right
as God ordained; thus you were meant to be.
But lightening streaks do terrify the night.

I met her for the first time at a downtown bar in Denver
On a Friday night while sipping Shiner beer.
We drank and danced and mingled and she told me she lived single,
In a small room at the Rustic Pioneer.

What started as a one night stand turned out to be a double;
I finally left on Monday about three.
If I stayed any longer I would have to face the trouble
Of a love affair that wasn’t meant to be.

On a trail not far behind me rode a lawman from Laredo,
With my picture on a poster and a price.
Dead or alive made no mind to the dead I’d left behind,
Who had died cheating at cards or playing dice.

I left her in Colorado; headed straight for South Dakota.
But I lied and said we’d meet in Santa Fe.
Should the trail lead him to her bed and he acted on what she said,
I’d gain several days sending him the wrong way.

But the bravest hearts are fools for love when fate has dealt the hand
And I headed back to Denver at full speed.
I returned there for the misses, who had won my heart with kisses,
Taking no heed of the danger in my deed.

Back in Denver I was taken by the lawman from Laredo.
But there is no hero in this tale of vice.
At a downtown bar in Denver the girl shot me from a barstool,
In her hand she held a poster with a price.

With a bullet in my shoulder, my gun never left the holster
And the lawman moved to quickly save my life.
I met her for the first time at a downtown bar in Denver
At a jailhouse altar she became my wife.