Lyrics Refuge Of The Roads - Live 1995 - Joni Mitchell

Now, I'm gonna have to tune this one string, it's been driving me crazy

I met a friend of spirit
A drunk with sage's eyes
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"
And he sent me then to the refuge of the roads

I fell in with some drifters
Cast upon a beach town
Winn Dixie cold-cut thieves
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
Ah, 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
'Til 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, 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
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 sun gold
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