Accompanied by a softly wheezing organ, Waits’ reading of Bukowski’s uncharacteristically meditative poem about a young man riding on a bus, “cut loose from purpose”, is suitably tender and gruffly sympathetic. When the bus stops at a roadside café the young man experiences a revelatory moment of perfect happiness, feeling that “everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful.” But despite his vow to stay in that clean, well-lighted place, he follows the other passengers into the bus when it’s time to reboard, and continues on his way. The world we have is too often the world we have failed to escape.
The poem was first published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Black Sparrow Press 1992; the audio version is collected on Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, ANTI Records 2006, and can be heard here
A Personal Anthology 