I Was Drunk The Day My Mom Got Out Of Prison

Johnny Cash: I've Been Everywhere

David Allen Coe: You Never Even Called Me By My Name


For the sake of a few lines
one must see many cities,
men and things. One must
know the animals, one must
feel how the birds fly
and know the gesture
with which the small flowers
open in the morning.
One must be able
to think back to roads
in unknown regions,
to unexpected meetings
and to partings which
one had long seen coming;
to days of childhood
that are still unexplained,
to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars--and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves--not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
--Rainer Maria Rilke