Two Cokes for Paul Nelson

Two Cokes for Paul Nelson

(Murphy / Lethem / Stratford

These are the elements of a verse

Sherman cigarettes - but it gets worse

Footprints on the running board of his wall

And by the way his name was Paul

And let’s not talk of his fall … just yet

Oh starved to death – that’s what the tabloids say

But you know - I don’t see it that way

In fact for me - the opposite is true

Paul was a glutton for everything he loved and knew

From Orson Welles, Ross Macdonald, Howard Hawks, Raymond C, Chet B, PKD, and

Warren Z … oh The New York Dolls and me

So let’s take a seat at the Jackson Hole

Let’s raise two cokes and toast his soul

The soul of a man - our friend

Paul Nelson – Paul Nelson

A magnum forty-five and a snub-nose thirty-eight

But books can kill if you can’t get them straight

A paragraph, a sentence, to a starving mind

Some die for want of an opening line

Life on a shrinking editorial island

Paul couldn’t lie, he couldn’t lie

Hey Rod Stewart - bashed out on a lark

Typing as fast as Lester Bangs could bark

Paul the quiet man, living in a borrowed head

An enabler who couldn’t get out of bed

Marathon man in a hamburger booth

He told the truth, he told the truth - that’s Paul

Let’s take a seat at the Jackson Hole

Let’s raise two cokes to toast his soul

The soul of a man - our friend

Paul Nelson – Paul Nelson

Abiding mentor, with a guiding mind

Freeze-frame, isolate the details, and then rewind

A stickler for the director’s cut

His own mis-en-scene, he fell into a rut

Scraps on the cutting-room floor

Shut the door, shut the door, shut the door

Now somehow he lost his way and that’s a pity

But in the words of Norma Desmond

The movies got small not Paul not Paul not Paul not Paul

A drink at the Jackson Hole

Two cokes oh let’s toast his soul

The soul of a man

Our dear friend

Paul Nelson – Paul Nelson

The older you get, the more you live with ghosts

And that’s according to Nick Tosches

who’s now among them

And Paul …