text: Rainey Williams playground was the Mott Haven streets
  Where he ran past melted candles and flower wreaths
  Names and photos of the young black faces
  Whose death and blood consecrated these places
  Raineys mother said, Rainey, stay at my side
  For you are my blessing, you are my pride
  Its your love here that keeps my soul alive
  I want you to come home from school and stay inside
  Raineyd do his work and put his books away
  There was a channel showed a Western movie everyday
  And that brought him home books on the black cowboys of the Oklahoma range
  The Seminole scouts that fought the tribes of the Great Plains
  Summer come and the days grew long
  Rainey always had his mothers smile to depend on
  Along the street of stray bullets, he made his way
  To the warmth of her arms at the end of each day
  Come the fall, the rain flooded these homes
  Here in Ezekiels valley of dry bones
  It fell hard and dark to the ground
  It fell without a sound
  Lynette took up with a man whose business was the boulevard
  Whose smile was fixed in a face that was never off guard
  In the pipes neath the kitchen sink, his secrets are kept
  In the day, behind drawn curtains in the next bedroom he slept
  And she got lost in the days
  The smile Rainey depended on dusted away
  The arms that held him were no more his own
  He lay at night his head pressed to her chest listening to the ghost in her bones
  In the kitchen, Rainey slipped his hand between the pipes
  From a brown bag pulled five hundred dollar bills and stuck it in his coat side
  Stood in the dark at his mothers bed
  Brushed her hair and kissed her eyes
  In the twilight, Rainey walked to the station on streets of stone
  Through Pennsylvania and Ohio, his train drifted on
  Through the small towns of Indiana, the big train crept
  As he lay his head back on the seat and slept
  He woke and the towns gave way to muddy fields of green
  Corn and cotton and endless nothing in between
  Over the rutted hills of Oklahoma, the red sun slipped and was gone
  The moon rose and stripped the earth to its bone