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VERSE

That said, I view lyric writing as a poetic form, and certainly aspire toward poetic ends. Exhibits are included here.

I Can Hardly Believe How Hard It Was to Be Me Before the Internet 

©RAR 2007

I can hardly believe

how hard it was 

to be me

Before

the Internet

For those who would like information, click here...

Riding On A Zephyr 

©RAR 2005

Riding On A Zephyr is a song born of a childhood memory. There used to be a passenger train that ran between Chicago and Denver called the Denver Zephyr. (Zephyr was the Greek and Roman God of the refreshing west wind.) There it became the California Zephyr for the leg from Denver to Oakland. For reasons now lost to me, my mother and I rode the Denver Zephyr when I was a kid in the late 1950s and in memory it was one of those foundation events. Though the line had operated since 1931, the Zephyrs seemed like real Cadillacs in their day, symbols of American technological wonder. To me, looking back, they represented the confident plunge into the future that was the American experience of the 1950s. History, however, didn't stop at that moment of serene naiveté. As a nation, we were in the grip of historic events. I could see it in my own family, as my father in his career was swept by a wave of technology that carried him from the age of television to the race for outer space. Along the way something went terribly wrong -- for all of us. That is what Riding On A Zephyr is about.

It started on a military base

Right outside of East St. Louis

Daddy was a radio man

It was nineteen fifty-two

 

Momma was a small town girl

By way of Oakland, California

All they had in common the mistake

Who is singing now to you

 

Everyone around us there

Was black as night, dark as murder

Everyone was poor

The men all dressed in uniform

 

Living there among them

We didn't really fit in but we tried to be friendly

That's how it was told to me

When I was old enough to hear the tale

 

After the Korean War

Daddy decided to leave the service

We headed for Nebraska

And the cold Nebraska plains

 

Riding on the Zephyr

Riding on the hope of a nation

Trying to get better

Than we had ever been before

 

Riding in to modern times

Tuning in to The World of Tomorrow

The new frontier

And revolution on the way

 

Midway through the time of Eisenhower

Daddy was part of a television age

Cathode rays, vacuum tubes and solder

Fixing a beam on the atomic rage

 

We were living on a tree-lined street

In Lincoln across from Tom, Dick and Harry

You could say these were innocent times

Everybody seemed to same

 

I think that we were happy then

But the best to come was just around the corner

Wind was sweeping under our wings

And there was magic everywhere

 

Riding on the Zephyr

Riding on the hope of a nation

Trying to get better

Than we had ever been before

 

Riding in to modern times

Tuning in to The World of Tomorrow

The new frontier

And revolution on the way

 

Soon enough a change was made

We picked up and moved to Denver, Colorado

Daddy got a job engineering

The mighty race for space

 

Momma's hair was turning silver

Though she was only twenty-seven

She didn't seem to mind

She was living in the laser light of day

 

Then in nineteen fifty-eight

There came along a little brother

Everything revolved around

Our nuclear family

 

Don't adjust your TV set

The vertical hold or the horizontal

We control the whole thing

All you have to do is sit

 

In a new dimension we were

Getting up early to see the launches

Titan, Mercury and Apollo

We were gilded in the flames

 

Sunning like a movie star

In our back yard with all the young mothers

Momma like a debutante

In those gold Colorado days

 

A whole generation asking

What can you do for your country

Then one day in Dallas

The answer came rumbling from the sky

 

The crack in the cosmic egg

Ripped with a sound out of Dealey Plaza

Pieces of the President's brain

Splattered on the ground

 

We saw it as a nation

We saw it on our TV screen

This place we all thought we were headed

Was not quite what it seemed

 

After that things started to get ugly

We went back to war, off to Viet Nam

Things began to feel quite different

In the home of the brave and the Promised Land

 

The world turned and it kept on changing

You could see it in the way people wore their hair

You could hear it in the streets where the protest was raging

You could hear the poet's howls in the liberty bell

 

And so it showed in the New Republic

And so it showed in the New York Times

And so it showed in the neighborhood theater

It was way too late for us to change our minds

 

Martin Luther King on a balcony in Memphis

Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel

Mayor Richard Daley on a hot night in Chicago

Richard Nixon on a cold night in hell

 

A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind

One too many slogans, one too many lines

One big blowout up in Woodstock

One too many holes shot in our Altamont minds

 

Riding on the Zephyr

Riding on the hope of a nation

Trying to get better

Than we had ever been before

 

Riding in to modern times

Tuning in to The World of Tomorrow

The new frontier

And revolutions fade away

 

Now I'm old and it seems like a movie

The way a smile disappears from a face

We never got to Canaan, never got to Canterbury

All we pilgrims got was the human race

                                            © RAR 2005

 

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