Yeah I am young once more morn late,
Call it the year of somebody's lord,
Call it nineteen sixty eight,
Hair to my shoulders
Makes me see better,
Parted down the middle,
The older black ladies,
On the new.york city subway,
One and all, bless me cause this Jew,
Looks just like Our Lord
In them Renaissance picture-books.
Ironically, that winter time,
I wear a white sheepskin jacket,
Purchased in the Old City of
Jerusalem, but don't tell'm that,
Cause they would have marched up to Harlem,
No telling what might've happened next...
Next summer reality intruded,
Money in pocket aid and ain't not enough,
Riding the bus on Euclid Ave.
To go downtown Cleveland, the Flats,
Drag racing and watching,
The river Cuyahoga burn,
Kinda of a bus drag, but very very, kinda cool.
Summer next,
Worked in a Republic Steel mill,
They called me the Macaroni Kid,
Cause stoopidly I told them that is
What I et,, with ketchup Heinz sauce,
Desert, a heath bar!
Cause I was saving my pennies,
This college kid they loved to hate,
Caused he bicycled to work and
Wasn't one of them.
Put me, little ole wiry me,
In the boxcars,
Loading and loafing the
Rebar, twisted and straight,
Came it, sent it all over,
Me, black as a
Pennsylvania coal miner,
A San Fran homeless man.
To this day, can't get my
Fingernails really clean.
At night, me and the boys on the porch,
Gettin ******, ****, music and a view of
Cleveland East, the sirens rushing around,
To the houses on fire, the next ******.
First freaked us out,
Coming to get us,
Then it became the best, finest ***
"That was so stony cool" light show.
The girls looked like Joan Baez,
And if they didn't,
We still took 'em to bed,
Pretending it was Janis,
If Joan was busy
In the dorm room next store.
Hey babe,
Wanna come back to my dorm room,
And drink wine, listen to Blood Sweat and Tears,
Make some of our own,
Cause my roomie gone down to Canton,
To visit his cleaning lady mom.
I loved that guy liked he was the first
Real person I'd ever met.
On my first day, without asking,
Ran his hands both all over my head,
Looking for the horns on the Jews head,
According his parish priest, we all had'em,
God's official representative on the consecrated earth of
Ohio.
In those days, I applied to schools
Farthest away from home,
That the student discounted airfare was no more than
59bucks which I could afford so I could go back to
NYC, and find out what was really
"Happening" man.
The summer next, worked in the East Village,
Summer Office Boy for a big corporation
In a part of town where you could buy
Leather fringed vests and the headshops sold
The paraphernalia to get hookah high,
And if you hookah lookah right,
That wasn't the thing they sold for cash money.
Took my steel mill blues money,
Bot me a '65 red mustang car,
That needed to be jumped to get started,
Courtesy of the Cleveland special hell called
Midwest winter.
That car, the floor was made of cardboard,
The four cylinders were bolted to the car,
So when u opened the hood, you saw mostly
The pavement of the parking lot,
Some tiny engine,
In between holding on for dear life.
Always kept extra brake fluid in the trunk,
In case the leak got bad on the Heights.
Needed to do what I needed to do,
So I wrote a resume of whom I was,
And whom I ain't, so I could get me a
Real big time job.
More on that someday,
When the resume is resumed,
Getting updated, that will be kinda funny,
Cause it will run about 500 pages long.
Right now, strange,
I am hard by hard by the Frisco bay,
The Ferry Building and the tripartite
Disposal systems of three garbage cans,
And who should appear, but
Otis and Sara B., (live from the Fillmore)
Singing to me about a dock on this bay.
Got me those 'high flying blues,'
The kind that say;
"Lord, look at me here,
I'm rooted like a tree here,
Got those sit-down, can't cry,
Oh, Lord, gonna die blues."
Missing that dock of mine,
In the picture next to my invisible head.
You want to know my face?
Maybe when back east,
I'll find that photo of that long haired college boy,
Leaning in on, so proud against that red Mustang.
Right now all I got these here old vignettes,
True stories one and all,
Making me miss my dock, my shelter,
On that old adirondack chair,
Where my **** aches, and my mind fevered
With poems of love children and a life that
Tho dim recalled, I see it all so well.
Seems the Frisco water still "energized,"
Cause here I am every morning burning
A hole in my back, writing memories,
I never tole my family while working
The wriding shift that starts at 4:00 am.
-------
See: Nat Lipstadt · Oct 5
True Stories #1
--------
River burning,
See
http://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/63
-------
Sara Bareilles
Mar 12, 2011 -
Sara Bareilles, live at the Fillmore -
► 4:57► 4:57
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLHB-LqvvxY
Feb 6, 2011 - Uploaded by Axel Noor
Sara Bareilles, live at the Fillmore - "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay".
-----------
To many notes take the pleasure aaaway.
The stories spun from the threads of my life.
"The crazy painter from the streets,
Painted crazy patterns on your sheets,
And it's all over now baby blue
