I met a friend of spirit
|
He drank and womanized
|
And I sat before his sanity
|
I was holding back from crying
|
He saw my complications
|
And he mirrored me back simplified
|
And we laughed how our perfection
|
Would always be denied
|
"Heart and humor and humility"
|
He said "Will lighten up your heavy load"
|
I left him for the refuge of the roads
|
|
I fell in with some drifters
|
Cast upon a beachtown
|
Winn Dixie cold cuts and highway hand me downs
|
And I wound up fixing dinner
|
For them and Boston Jim
|
I well up with affection
|
Thinking back down the roads to then
|
The nets were overflowing
|
In the Gulf of Mexico
|
They were overflowing in the refuge of the roads
|
|
There was spring along the ditches
|
There were good times in the cities
|
Oh, radiant happiness
|
It was all so light and easy
|
Till I started analyzing
|
And I brought on my old ways
|
A thunderhead of judgment was
|
Gathering in my gaze
|
And it made most people nervous
|
They just didn't want to know
|
What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads
|
|
I pulled off into a forest
|
Crickets clicking in the ferns
|
Like a wheel of fortune
|
I heard my fate turn, turn turn
|
And I went running down a white sand road
|
I was running like a white-assed deer
|
Running to lose the blues
|
To the innocence in here
|
These are the clouds of Michelangelo
|
Muscular with gods and sungold
|
Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads
|
|
In a highway service station
|
Over the month of June
|
Was a photograph of the earth
|
Taken coming back from the moon
|
And you couldn't see a city
|
On that marbled bowling ball
|
Or a forest or a highway
|
Or me here least of all
|
You couldn't see these cold water restrooms
|
Or this baggage overload
|
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads
|
|
-----------------
|
Refuge Of The Roads
|
| Joni Mitchell |
