Americana, USA Jerome A thousand sleepy nowhere towns with a thousand red brick courthouses, BBQ smokehouses with ‘the world's best ribs,' swinging-door saloons, white picket fences A billion miles of negro road stretched out to the ends of the earth Telephone poles, like crucifixes, stand beside the path – silent soldiers to watch over the innocent youth And give comfort to the homesick vagabond who's long long way from familiar land, Water towers with country names and homey slogans – Bains, Wakefield, Clayton, Oak Grove – ‘The Friendliest Folk in Kansas' Fields of wheat corn rice tobacco – rusted trucks on cinder blocks Red White & Blue flying in the wind (showing their American pride) on the front of time-eaten shanty houses and the skeletal remains of failed dreams Churchyard cemeteries where the unknown dead sip aural whiskey and reminisce, Small green mile-markers giving the hobo hope that one day between two of those signs, in some unknown Shangri-La – they will find solace, We're all just cute little dharma bums looking for a place to hang our hearts, A nation (a world) of wanderers – on a quest to find redemption freedom peace love enlightenment – not even sure what we're searching for, A people looking for the truth it lost in the couch cushions of selfishness, Others have traveled the same path – Neal, Greg, Alan, Jack, but spent so much time enraptured with scenery that they looked neither forward nor back, Some of us travel to far-away lands, some search their very soul, I've seen a hundred thousand towns – every one the same – the symptom of a sordid world that doesn't know what to believe anymore.