In Luxembourg I drew breath -
|
I sat out in the hot August night
|
listening to the homesick talk of strangers.
|
Captured by the white tales of trekkers,
|
journeyers fresh from Greece and Italy,
|
drifters up from Spain and Portugal.
|
New codes of conduct for the young -
|
part imported from the new world:
|
anti-violence, anti-foreign wars,
|
abhorance for hunger in Bengal.
|
There had to be more to life,
|
there had to be more than death,
|
there had to be something to it all?
|
Such questions never leave the lips
|
of those born to see the world -
|
youth rushes at us all ablaze
|
before old age snuffs the flame.
|
The answer is plain,
|
the answer is always the same,
|
the answer comes with the pain
|
by asking the question again.
|
A travel-weary Californian,
|
too old to make the draft for Nam,
|
had lived the beatnik life in San Francisco
|
on the Golden Park side of town.
|
Haight had flowered into hippy love
|
when a singer gifted weeds into a crowd.
|
Drugs became an asprin to violence,
|
love became the solution to war.
|
A composer became more popular than Christ,
|
and a President more hated than the Devil
|
who had butchered a Hollywood star.
|
Outcast - but reborn
|
like the cirlce of life
|
going on and on.
|
Californian Bob was the first of many
|
I met from the new Atlantis -
|
a state where dreams come true
|
like some Disney tale of fancy -
|
living legends and self-made fortunes.
|
And I lily-white from my parents care,
|
fresh from a council house in Pollokshaws,
|
I swore I would reach the furthest shores
|
or die within along the way.
|
Time grants the wish of those determined,
|
fate takes those whose time is wasted.
|
My future was already charted -
|
I was to be - a civil engineer.
|
I had the choice of two universities.
|
Which one? I was still undecided.
|
I had no idea of the great cosmic whole,
|
