The Ballad of Boxcar Clayton Jones

Did you ever hear about the hobo, Boxcar Clayton Jones?
He lied, cheated, and stole his way, across the interzones.
Once he was a stockbroker, or so the old stories say,
hated life on Wall Street and threw it all, shirt and tie, away.

He met his wife while hunting snipes on the streets of Chicago,
they shared a smoke and a toke, as she strummed her old banjo;
she’d just escaped the psych ward, wore a jacket that was straight,
said, “psychiatry is a racket, man. Me, they never will sedate.”

They hopped a train to the far out west, to live life in the sun,
and since that day have never strayed, have lived their life as one.
They made love in the orange groves, and picked Humboldt County weed,
sleeping underneath the burning stars in that far off land of the free.

One day he went to the pawn shop, to swipe her a ring of silver,
and when he slipped it on her finger, she broke out in goose bump shivers.
They were wed by a drunken preacher, one they met on a spellbound train,
who said that he was hellbound—preaching had only caused him pain.

In Chattanooga they got off the rails, to see what fortune had in store,
and there they met the Buddha of the south, in a shack on a dirt floor.
He was a sadhu from the holler, who found enlightenment on moonshine,
and folks came from all around to seek white lightning at his shrine.

Boxcar Clayton took a swig when the communion jug was passed around,
and felt the senses of his spirit tug when he heard the whistle sound;
outside the long iron horse was gathering up its coal black steam:
it was time to ditch this two-bit town and see if they could hitch a dream.

Now Clatyon Jones, he was not a rich man, he left all his money behind,
but he loved his wife and the clack of the track, and despised the daily grind,
so they road along the interzones from Kalamazoo to Poughkeepsie,
from the North to the South, to the West from the East, up and down the Mason Dixie.

​And when their bones got too tired to travel any further, or very far,
they settled themselves down on the Ohio river in a rusted out boxcar.