A blue sky blackened and broke open
All without even a bit of warning
And a bad time came on
A fifteen day long downpour storming
I took a look at the wrack of my home
All sunken on the day that flood quit
I didn't waste to grieve I took a ride that evening
And never looked back at that mud pit
I live to tell my tale, whether apocryphal or proper
I took off onward from the nighttime dawnward
With nothing but a pocketful of copper
I neither did care nor wonder what plunder
Fortune or decay would the West hold
Day by day so rugged I made my way
From pitiful city to pesthole
All that while over the wide open mile
The germ of the man that I am festered
Through skies so boundless with trouble all around us
I followed the wallow of that corruption westward
Every day I died in that saddle
Riding till I felt the fiber of my flesh turn pain
Through wood through dale downriver and over trail
I made it to the western plain
Land of the rotten and good, the clay pot and cottonwood
I made it but I can't say how, boy
I lived by a bludgeon but nobody was judging
Back then when I was a cowboy
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
Even today I can still see that drinkery filthy
Wormwood bubbling up in the dramgla**
It flooded my brain so damn fast
In a second I reckon it hit me like a sandblast
Saw damnation clear as daybreak
In a vision that I had in my head then
I walked on fire, choking on smoke
In the wicked valley of the shadow of the dead men
Just like a foundling in a wild surrounding
Looking at a world so brutal and beastly
The way that it gripped my brain that vision
Did it really ever release me?
It was that day then when I knew through the darkness
Every bit of the good in me was gone sir
I strode down deeper into the bowel of the valley
Where even the most vile unreckonable monster
Looking at me through bright red eyes so mightily
Wailed, turned tail from the sight of me
For the half day I treaded that pathway
Looking on sights so rank and unseemly
Saw no light and didn't care didn't frighten
I knew then nothing would ever redeem me
Hellfire faded and died the sky broke up
Bedraggled and ragged in daybroken open I woke up
Knowing in my core no mortal nor war
Nothing could destroy me, hinder me, harm me
Fearless, and with a newfound clearness
I scrabbled up in the saddle and rode like an army
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
On a strange and ancient saltscape
At the foot of a land of sand and shale
My solitary form is traveling up along a lonesome and abandoned trail
But I saw then distant skyline riders
All blurred by the heat rays
Out of a long gone bloodland now they appeared here
Ravenous half-savage and meat-crazed
I tried to out run them but I knew I was done when I turned
To a sight to terrorize
Two men wicked and cruel, painted in wicked gruel
Rapidly riding upon me pairwise
When that first rider drew near
I levered a pistol ball all ready to cap it
And from my pocket I drew that weapon
Leveled at that rider rapid and fired
With the rigor of the trigger lingering in my finger
Ring of smoke moldering into thin air
I looked at that empty saddle
Voided of the rider who had been there
But I heard nor saw no man nor bits of blown blown shardwise scattering
I saw no body no man no blood
And toward me that horse was clattering
I looked on yonder frightened to ponder
Strange and unnatural forces
And I did not see nor hear both men
Running around behind me horseless
With a blow to the back I toppled
And tumbling down that hot rock hill I snowballed
With a warlike holler both of the men followed
Quickening in a flash of cobalt
The two drew near and I knew my doom
I felt my heartbeat slackening
But lying on my back
I saw in the sun
The coming of a strange, blackened ring
I drew my boot blade against those two
In the second it took them to look up at that black sun
I k**ed the couple of them graveyard dead
But I swear it gave no satisfaction