I was walking by the graveyard, late last Friday night,
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I heard somebody yelling, it sounded like a fight.
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It was just a drunken hobo dancing circles in the night,
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Pouring whiskey on the headstones in the blue moonlight.
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So often have I wondered where these homeless brothers go,
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Down in some hidden valley were their sorrows cannot show,
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Where the police cannot find them, where the wanted men can go.
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There's freedom when your walking, even though you're walking slow.
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Smash your bottle on a gravestone and live while you can,
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that homeless brother is my friend.
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It's hard to be a pack rat, it's hard to be a 'bo,
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but living's so much harder where the heartless people go.
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Somewhere the dogs are barking and the children seem to know
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That Jesus on the highway was a lost hobo.
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And they hear the holy silence of the temples in the hill,
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And they see the ragged tatters as another kind of thrill.
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And they envy him the sunshine and they pity him the chill,
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And they're sad to do their living for some other kind of thrill.
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Smash your bottle on a gravestone and live while you can,
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that homeless brother is my friend.
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Somewhere there was a woman, somewhere there was a child,
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Somewhere there was a cottage where the marigolds grew wild.
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But some where's just like nowhere when you leave it for a while,
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You'll find the broken-hearted when you're travelling jungle-style.
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Down the bowels of a broken land where numbers live like men,
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Where those who keep their senses have them taken back again,
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Where the night stick cracks with crazy rage, where madmen don't pretend,
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Where wealth has no beginning and poverty no end.
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Smash your bottle on a gravestone and live while you can,
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that homeless brother is my friend.
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The ghosts of highway royalty have vanished in the night,
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The Whitman wanderer walking toward a glowing inner light.
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The children have grown older and the cops have gripped us tight,
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There's no spot round the melting pot for free men in their flight.
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And you who leave on promises and prosper as you please,
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The victim of your riches often dies of your disease,
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He can't hear the factory whistle, just the lonesome freight train's wheeze,
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He's living on good fortune, he ain't dying on his knees.
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Smash your bottle on a gravestone and live while you can,
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that homeless brother is my friend.
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That homeless brother is my friend.
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Homeless Brother
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| Don McLean |
