Condition Oakland

[Verse 1]

I rode down to the tracks

Thinking they might sing to me

But they just stared back

Broken, trainless, and black as night

Climbed out on to my roof

So I'd be a poet in the night

Beat the walls off my room

I saw the big room that is this life

[Chorus]

This is my condition:

Naked and hysterical

Reaching to grab a hand that I just slapped back at

This is my condition:

Desperate, alone, without an excuse

I try to explain

Christ, what's the use?

[Verse 2]

Read and I felt so small

Some words keep speaking when you close the book

Drank and just about smiled

Then I remembered us in that bed

Put my ear to the door

I just heard hot rods and gunshots and sirens

People kill me these days

There's keys in their eyes but they locked from the inside

[Chorus]

This is my condition:

Naked and hysterical

Reaching to grab a hand that I just slapped back at

This is my condition:

Desperate, alone, without an excuse

I try to explain

Christ, what's the use?

[Sample: Jack Kerouac reading "October in the Railroad Earth"]

"...and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of

Boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of

Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine

Calling our mountains. But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart. It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum

Mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco..."

"...the street is loaded with darkness. Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs and blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of interior, the grime inside the word in mouths falling out tooth

By tooth, the reading rooms tick tock bigclock with creak

Chair and slantboards and old faces looking up over rimless

Spectacles bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liverpool

England pawnshop long before I was born and across

Rains they've come to the end of the land sadness end of the

World gladness all you San Franciscos will have to fall eventually

And burn again. But I'm walking and one night..."