Soon, Again

Here Are My Plans


Here are my plans:
First I’ve got to call people up
And find out who’ll be where
And who’ll be where when
And find out if they know who’ll be who when
Once I’ve figured that all out
The thing to do
Is load up the car
With food and music and gorgeous things
Fill it up with gas
Fill it up with two tanks of gas!
Check the air level in the tires
Check the oil
The coolant
Smell it, does it smell good inside?
And off I go!
Drive here, drive there, drive all over,
Find who is who when they are there,
Pick ‘em up and keep haulin’
Go neat places and take backpacks
And eat lunch on bridges
Always on bridges
Go to furniture stores and lay on couches
Jump off sofas!
Buzz by beaches, oh baby,
Buzz by beaches and sniff the salt
Sift the sand
Empty our pockets and hand everything to the person to our left
And back in the car baby
Late night driving on turnpikes come up with nicknames
Crazy nicknames for each other
Sugardaddy Longlegs or Celery Kool-Aid
Count the bears alongside the road
And park in towns and hitchhike to cemeteries
Dance around headstones like crazy Popsicles
And pretend we are dead
Laying vertical staring at signs and meeting God
Kissing the damned and braying like donkeys,
And spin baby spin till you’re dizzy
And back in the car baby
And maybe fill it up with gas twice again
Let’s go to monuments and parks
And praise the builders and shakers
The stone links of history and manners
Never stopping to wonder where they went
Where they got to
Never worrying about the rain
Lets get wet we were born that way
Let’s return to the womb but this time it’s a car
It’s a car we have piled into and gassed up
And it’s plummeting through the countryside
The townside the monuments the acres of alfalfa
We’ll drive briefly on the lawns
The lawns of stationary folks
And laugh like it was crazy baby like it was crazy
Make rest stops and tape money to stray dogs
Tape money anywhere
To stop signs and open windows
On apple pies and shoes in the locker room at the public pool
Let’s tape money to things baby!
People will find it and be confused and lovely
And assured that the world is as unpredictable as they have always suspected
And maybe they’ll start taping money to things
And wouldn’t that be lovely?
And then back in the car guys
We’ve got states to shoo away
And horizons to spraypaint,
We’ll paint beautiful graffiti on turtles
People say not to but let’s do it
Only old and lecherous turtles
Only the worst turtles, man,
We’ll walk all the trails and passages
The one’s people write about
Sleep under growing stars
Twirling nightscapes
And name galaxies, make things up baby
We’ll make things up guys
And never stop never stop making things up
And then back to the car
Always back to the car
Fill it up with gas again
Buy a CB radio and talk to the air
Make the most beautiful promises to the air
And take it with us
Into the most treacherous cities
The concrete damsels and evening fools
We’ll take the air with us in the car baby!
Nothing’s too dangerous on this trip,
We’ll wander down the alleys skipping like children
Singing gently to the world oh yeah
Kneel before the manholes and sewer grates
Like they were portals to another world
A world of upside-down mirroring us
Following us like a hand two-inches above a clear puddle
And let’s make sure we’ve got crayons with us
And let’s make sure we’re never hungry
And let’s make sure there’s plenty of water
And we’ll do jumping jacks in thunderstorms baby
We’ll buy pumpkins and put them in trees
Way up in trees just to do it
And walk through glades not in single file
Who would do that anyway
And back in the car guys
Fill ‘er up again thrice
I want to see swampland
And I want to see famous birthplaces, like Maine,
And I want to see factories where things real things useful things get made
Things I use man I want to see where they get made
I want to find streetlamps shaped like exclamation points
And I want to see prisons
Where bad people and unfortunate people and some good people live
Let’s tape money to the prisons too while we are there
And let’s shake the hands of strangers
Ugly strangers
And call little boys sir
And call little girls ma’am
I want to see huge balls of twine
And I want to see the world’s largest scale model of the world
Let’s buy underwear at yard sales and stop being scared of stupid little things like that
As a matter of fact let’s go to the first yard sale we see,
Earnestly and silently survey the whole thing and declare without humor,
“We’ll take it,”
And buy all of someone else’s old,
And put it all in the car man put it all in the car
Lives can fit in cars
They can fit in urns and coffee-shops
And we’ll keep moving
I want to see state capitols man
I want to throw a baseball across a state line baby
Let’s go to an Indian Reservation
And ask Indians if they still make sweet promises to the air
And then reach down into our backpacks and give them something
Something nice or not whatever we have
A peeled onion or bug spray or money we found taped to something baby!
And then we’ve got to keep motoring, fill that tank up for a dozen, guys,
We’ve got miles to go before we sleep
We still have to draw eternal pictures in the dirt with backscratchers
And try our hand at re-enactments
And rolling down hills in huge tires and stop being scared of stupid little things like that
And driving the car through narrow swaths in corn fields
And always keep moving, keep moving,
Keep moving, keep moving,
Keep moving forward, baby!