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 flacid 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