His joker card was limp like whiskey
His two of hearts was stiff but willing
He bet it all with his slumlord guise
For a left handed girl who never got it right

Where the vertebrates of the blue-blood giants
Are history beneath the flatlands
Growing wheatgrass to fit the drifter's teeth,
And the sky a chamber-choir you can hear the angels sing:

"What a sight for his scrap-yard eyes!
Oh why, Wyoming, why won't you ease
His shangri-la dreams under land-lock and key?"

"Oh land of milk and honey!"
Shy, shy, shy, Cheyenne, makes him wish
Washington was where he was from
" Why, oh why, did I believe those ghost town merchants
Painting deserts green?"
Now he's stretched and slain across her bent lonesome plains

"So lift me up boys, lift me up boys
Lift me up boys, lift me up boys,
And don't let me down til' the Lord deals a better hand"

When she blushes out a sigh of sunshine
He is but an echo of a treacherous heaven far above
This nowhere west with no one left to love