Flashback            


When I first heard Sad-Eyed Lady, 
I thought Dylan was singing to me, 
in my early twenties, 
I thought I was invincible,
I was an unwed mother with a baby, 
but that didn’t stop me from taking 
far too much LSD, and running out 
into the streets of New York City.
I thought everyone we passed 
was wearing a mask.
“Why isn’t anybody REAL?” 
My friends kept shushing me. 
We went home to the Sad-Eyed Lady— 
that song got seared and scorched 
and burned into my memory.
Maybe that acid was cut with speed, 
or maybe I just took too much, 
but the Tambourine Man never 
led me on such a downer before. 
I thought LSD and me, we
had a natural affinity. 
I thought it would never leave me 
stuck in the wrong song.
But no one ever came to my gate 
with any Arabian drums,                        
every time I heard that song for years, 
I would go so far down into Desolation Row, 
like some innocent struck dumb, 
with a fatherless child, waiting, up on a pedestal, 
stuck like an insistent needle skipping 
monotonously on thin vinyl,
the ghosts of every lost relationship drift down 
the dark back alleyways of fading dreams, 
trapped in rhyme schemes,
young and spinning wildly, it was so easy 
to get hooked on a song.