Bridges Lyrics

After I'd burned all my bridges again,
And headed to some other government town,
Trapped with rank strangers, where the fields had turned brown,
That's when they told me that you were around.

I'd taken a job at the assayer's office,
It was lab work and called on some skills I had honed,
Way back in the silverstrike days of November,
Way up in the North Country bleakness of home.

You'd rode into town in your 4-wheeled Explorer,
Covered with dust, the grit on your face,
And set up your shop at Hotel L'Aventura,
'Mid whispers of diamonds and rubies and lace.

In a heartbeat the boys were all over your case,
And you spun out your stories into garments so fair,
While I sat in my emptied-out office and wondered,
Was it time to start packing my knapsacks again?

I thought--What a fool!--that you might come to see me,
In my microscope arsenic leached the gold from the waste,
But I just couldn't focus my heart to a distance
Where diamonds could equally glitter as paste.

Now the train racks and rattles down the Mexican canyon,
And cinders burn holes in my ragged blue jeans,
In an hour or two I will come to the jungle,
I'll stand on the platform in an ocean of green.

And stare at the wanteds for Ché and Zapata,
Faded and rotting but there just the same;
A cigar in my teeth, to keep off mosquitoes,
In a land where no one will remember my name.
(repeat first verse., then d.c. first line)