Bridges - Bill Hicks

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)