Little green men coming out of paint cans,
Phosphate mines and Slaked Lime, 1966, he was sixteen,
it’s Central Florida in the era of the dragline,
play it over the pit and dig up more of that green shit,
and trade it with the Russians, who are traditionally hated,
you can imagine that after a few years
that you’d run out of things to say,
and I’ll be here every day.
Phospho~Gypsum, Radon-222,
the daughters watch over you,
on a transformer four stories high it walks like a cripple
and turns on its base,
diggin’ up that Dicalcium Phosphate.
Travel the blacktop
and you won’t have far to go to find an alien civilization,
a creature from a creation that’s from outer space.
Sixty foot high for miles around;
one million tons of Phospho~Gypsum tailings rise to the sky.
Nearly half the world’s fertilizer once lay beneath the overburden;
it got taken off this sandbar,
and now there’s something that’s left behind.
Hey, this place is a mess!
‘what are you takin’ about?
I’ll clean it up later.
No, that’s not the way it is at all, I’m not a miner I don’t care,
man, that’s pant of the system, I’m punk,
but who’s gonna indict the Wall Street Journal, just me and Bob Ray,
it’s just part of the system here on the surface of the planet
and the day has come when there’s only work left
There’s unlimited sunshine in a bottle of Tropicana,
with his friends and his ‘Spooky Tooth’ 8-track flipped upside down,
drivin’ in his Mercury Monterey down to Lithia Springs,
saying that if we could take the tailings,
and build a building for the New York Stork Exchange,
then we could tell everyone about
how we live in a state that digs Radon by the ton
and you’ll be loved by everyone,
and the government will give us a Superfund,
and ‘we’re Radon, and that’s Science Fiction.
