Who is left to doubt the cold insistence of Americas trek

binge and purge
binge and purge
binge and purge

until your bones are spit out and left to dry in a moon
that is red as the sun they’ll bury you under?
No longer thirsty for the dragons blood that forms puddles in the purple sky
above San Francisco, that drips like a forgotten melody. Or a new song.

And if the psalm refused to sing would you raise your voice in triumph?
Or would the sound only ring hollow? No truth in the pictures that tell the tale.
Or would you simply laugh

Lying face up on a green rock that is surrounded by a confederacy of imitators?
Blurted in repentance or to concur the deafening silence
for a time, like an ocean for the shore.

Is there anywhere you can go
that you’d truly be unknown, rising ragged and tired to dance
across the graves of our fathers and children,
in a joyous defiance? Was it a right

or left we made outside the Haight, trying to recapture
the cryptic visions you found at the Acid Test?
Before they rolled that wagon in to take you back to Neal + Jack.

Bob Weir is dead, at least that’s what the Internet said,
in a rush and a flash he was off to the cool and dark
with only his song left to explain what it really means
to be an American. As much the child as the old man.