OLD BIKERS

The old ones stand out, now their numbers are dwindling down.
They're a sad loss to the American scene, these individualists with the worn down clothes and faces.

You can still see them sometimes, the real ones, some in packs, not as large as a while ago, sometimes alone.
The alone one is the best. One who's been there a long time, staying with the life he loves, never giving in to a system that sucks you up like a vortex if you slip just one foot into it.

He's got his connections, a few like him, that care for and protect each other.
Hanging onto the only unique lifestyle left, like old dinosaurs.
Their faces are leathered and rough by forty, but their eyes are still sharp and knowing.
Some are gray and have white in their beards and braids, some have limps in their steps and some pain in their kidneys.

They know no other life, their lives merely a dreary journey into everyone else's monotony.
He looks at the new ones, then turns away, knowing they will never know of life on the road, and of the women who can take it.

Wild, loving women who will hang in with them because they love it too.
A woman with a wild heart and a loyal soul, that's what's needed here.
The new ones are shiny and young and a bit too clean.
They're born into a system that has an iron grip now.
The new ones will never know and couldn't take "the life."

I think it's a mystique, even to the old ones, why this life is theirs, but it is, and it's the only one they know.

When the last biker falls, like the dinosaurs, the sun will go down on a breed of heart-of-gold, tough as nails, free-spirited men, who, even at their worst, love what's theirs and protect it.