See Arkansaw
i asked the man when texas ended
he said if yer lucky it won’t
i said i gotta a gift i gotta get to fort smith
i was startin to lose all hope
the night was young when he pulled out a gun
the bullet jus missed my nose
i thought i was delivered when i crossed the big river
i thought i knew, but i jus didn’t know
refrain:
i passed over the ozarks
and onto the ouachitas
i skipped from poverty to poverty
fenced in in arkansas, arkansas…
i saw the soybean fields and the flat bed trucks
and i watched the concrete creep
subdivided shoutin on a blackrock mountain
sayin this is how feels to be free
i read the billboard scripture
prophesying my damnation
reaching for his life, preachers on his third wife
out in branson on a big vacation
refrain
i saw a nuclear plant
homegrown
and i know it ain’t fake cause they grew it in a lake
that they built jus to cool it’s bones
they handed out alotta badges
and made alotta energy
that they fired in a wire across state lines
while the state slurps up the fee
and there’s hardly a place that meth aint
planted a dead white kiss
you can smell it in the air you can see it in a chair
itsa pretty damn hard to miss
i saw a law man shrug his whole body
resign in an american god
said if they wanted to, they would help themselves
then he put away his bible and got out a gun
refrain
if god lives up in the rockys
if that’s where the big man meddles
then a lesser being of a lower degree
musta come down here and settled
i met revelators and archimandrites
the big and the belittled
deep in my mind i reckon all in good time
we’re all agonna meet in the middle
refrain
Doxology:
i can’t tell ya where one thing ended and another
did occur
it was new and it was old to me
it was more than i could observe
if what is seen is for the taking
and the taking can be seen
i’m gonna need your help with the calculations
i’m not sure what it all could mean
i passed over the ozarks and onto the ouachitas
i skipped from poverty to poverty
fenced in in arkansas
arkansas…
