I met a friend of spirit
  He drank and womanized
  And I sat before his sanity
  I was holding back from crying
  He saw my complications
  And he mirrored me back simplified
  And we laughed how our perfection
  Would always be denied
  "Heart and humor and humility"
  He said "Will lighten up your heavy load"
  I left him for the refuge of the roads
  I fell in with some drifters
  Cast upon a beachtown
  Winn Dixie cold cuts and highway hand me downs
  And I wound up fixing dinner
  For them and Boston Jim
  I well up with affection
  Thinking back down the roads to then
  The nets were overflowing
  In the Gulf of Mexico
  They were overflowing in the refuge of the roads
  There was spring along the ditches
  There were good times in the cities
  Oh, radiant happiness
  It was all so light and easy
  Till I started analyzing
  And I brought on my old ways
  A thunderhead of judgment was
  Gathering in my gaze
  And it made most people nervous
  They just didn't want to know
  What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads
  I pulled off into a forest
  Crickets clicking in the ferns
  Like a wheel of fortune
  I heard my fate turn, turn turn
  And I went running down a white sand road
  I was running like a white-assed deer
  Running to lose the blues
  To the innocence in here
  These are the clouds of Michelangelo
  Muscular with gods and sungold
  Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads
  In a highway service station
  Over the month of June
  Was a photograph of the earth
  Taken coming back from the moon
  And you couldn't see a city
  On that marbled bowling ball
  Or a forest or a highway
  Or me here least of all
  You couldn't see these cold water restrooms
  Or this baggage overload
  Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads