Ellis Paul - Tornado Girl (poem) lyrics

Sandy has seen a tornado more times than she's seen the Grateful Dead... She lives in Oklahoma Where the storms come prairie fed And the numbers keep on mounting It's been twenty times and counting That she's been in the path of Splintered trees and twisted lead That connect the dots between trailer parks With destruction that's painted blood red And now she wants to chase them With ME, in my Honda Civic "We'll keep a SAFE distance." I say, "Give me an instance Where 'safety' is MILEAGE SPECIFIC..." Okemah is where the last one touched down (that's Woody Guthrie's old home town) and (as if it would turn me around) She starts singing "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND" I say, "OK, You win.....Terrific." Now, I've never been to see something That I wished wasn't even there Though I've heard that said of dentists And with in'laws, and from victims of the electric chair But there I was, heading east on 44 Getting pelted by hailstones the size of BARN DOORS So, of course, NONE of them were missing.. It was as if GOD was keeping score And THE HEAVENS were thundering their approval... Thats when I suggested our hasty removal Just a mile down the road, this rain of hailstones ceased And a vaacuum of silence brought a turbulent peace.... The clouds started dAnCiNg, dressed up in taffeta green And enveloped the sky in a jungle party theme-- There they gave birth to a barbed-wire wind Sandy was frozen, her face had a maniacal grin A funnel cloud came roaring, cast down from the sky Like the knife of the Devil but twenty stories high! Sandy broke from the car in a mad, desperation run To touch her sole fixation, this wheel where d**h was spun And I could do but nothing, my heart came so undone For the host of twenty tornadoes Who died with twenty-one...