From when I dropped out of Hunter College through my 20s I spent a lot of time in the neighborhood where I was born near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The rest of the Bronx called it The Green since we were right next to a golf course but we called it The Rail, since we would all sit on the railing that ran up and down the street. It was the sixties and drugs were rampant but for me it was mostly about a sense of despair that my life wouldn’t start until I got out of there. There is a reference to Hickey in the song; that’s the Hickey in Ice Man Cometh.
Lyrics
Song of the Rail
I certainly could have entertained
Bareback riding, hashesh‑smoking prostitutes who end up
Choking on the attitudes I left unexplained
But they talked of distances, insisting that I leave
While they remain
Untampered with to get home safe and sound
But I just sneered, the gallery cheered
My alter ego reappeared
And I got set to fly
Until I thought about the ground
Where I’m securely bound
There, laughing at my window in the rain
An old friend from God knows when
Just speaks to ask where he can send
A cake with a file for to cut through my chains
To him it’s a prison to be anywhere
About which he complains
And so I thought I’d hear what he put down
He analyzed my life until
I jumped up on my window sill
And I got set to fly
Until I thought about the ground
Where I’m securely bound
There’s a spot somewhere behind a set of walls
Where lovers come and salesmen drum
And I sit glum with coke and rum
And hum (and strum) “Sweet Blindness”
Thought I know it’s all a stall
For now I’m pleased by distances
Restricted as they are by one and all
I get amused and then the laughs abound
Enemies join arm in arm
Some Hickey leads them in a psalm
And I get set to fly
At least my soul will not be found
Where I remain securely bound.