Crossroads

Went down to the crossroads

Tried to beg a ride. 

Asked, can anyone show me mercy?

Got nowhere left to hide;

Too many diamonds on this road, too much dirt and distance,

Signs that point to one-horse towns where the blacktop dies;

Too many tire-track hollows in the gritty scrublands, 

Ruts and trails filled in by fickle winds on the chapparal.

Lord have mercy, cries the lost man

Stumbling on the sidewalk, gimme-a-dime drunk 

And on his knees. 

Lord, he begs for mercy,

Keeps his two-time riders by his side; 

Dog-gone blind and on the highway,

Needs a shut-eyed savior, times like these.

Standing at the crossroads. Got to choose.

Got to choose. Head-spinning, dead-of-night sickness

He hears his badmouth talking, feels the blues.

Follow him down, follow him down,

Falling west to some deep valley,

To a sun-cracked salt-pan where skulls are scattered,

Grinning as they dry their white bones in the heat;

Or falling east to lakes where hurricane rain

Drives wet into the eyes, cascades of tears;

Or falling north to snowmelt bottomlands when ice

Forsakes the ground and black flies suck the blood; 

Or just standing at the crossroads, 

Where all ways point to home,

Rooted to the slab, not a muscle moving, 

Still as dying, not yet gone.

Lost soul at a crossroads, 

Tries to understand

How crossroads, just like rivers, 

Ebb and flood and finally drown;

Nobody seems to know him, 

Standing at the crossroads

He believes he’s sinking down.

© BH, 2016

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Found John Mayer’s cover of Crossroads on his Battle Studies album. Then I listened to Cream do it because that’s how I heard it first. Somewhere, I probably heard Robert Johnson sing it - but I don’t know when.

When I found the lyrics, though, I realised how much I’d made up in my own head and then carried in memory for so long. So here came Crossroads of my own, filled with snatches of wrong-remembered lines, an echo of the blues and, just for good measure, the futility of choice.

Illustrated with a still of a crossroad in the streets of Cairo Illinois, a ruin of a city at  the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. Johnson’s crossroads were at Clarksdale, Mississippi much further south beyond Memphis. Same river.

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.

Down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.

Asked the Lord above for mercy, "Save me if you please."