Golden Age of Leather

Raise your can of beer on high

And seal your fate forever

Our best years have past us by

The golden age of leather

This was the night not long to come in the year of our Lord A.D.

Where in a desert way-house, poised on the brink of eternity

Four and ninety studded horsemen closed the knot of honor

As only drunken soldiers can

And passed from man to man, a wanton child to dead to care

That each would find his pleasure as he might

For this fantastic night was billed as nothing less than the end of

An age

A last crusade, a final outrage, in this day of flaccid plumage

And there was worn no cloth but leather

Made supple by years of stinging cinders

And here were seen the scars of age

For age had been the common call for one last night together

Down colored the sky (the ritual feast)

Some had died (they were buried with their bikes)

Each grabbed a rag (from a man with a sack)

Torn strips of color (the red and the black)

We made a vow to give it all we had to give

We made a vow to die as we had lived

They flew the colors, they began to fight

They flailed at each other like bugs at a light

Bodies and bikes beyond repair

Smell of oil and gas in the air

Then the wind whipped the desert with a giant hand

And the humans and the Harleys caught the shifting sand

And the old ranger weathered the storm

And he topped the rise by the middle of morn

He saw rippled dunes, calm and surreal

And a glint of a shaft of chromium steel

Golden age