Sandy has seen a tornado more times than she's seen the Grateful Dead...
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She lives in Oklahoma,
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where the storms come prairie fed,
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And the numbers keep on mounting,
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It's been twenty times and counting
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that she's been in the path of
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splintered trees and twisted lead
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That connect the dots between trailer parks
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with destruction that's painted blood red
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And now she wants to chase them,
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with ME, in my Honda Civic,
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"We'll keep a SAFE distance."
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I say, "Give me an instance
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where 'safety' is MILEAGE SPECIFIC..."
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Okemah is where the last one touched down,
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(that's Woody Guthrie's old home town) and,
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(as if it would turn me around)
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she starts singing "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND"
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I say, "OK, You win.....Terrific."
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Now, I've never been to see something
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that I wished wasn't even there,
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Though I've heard that said of dentists,
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and with in'laws, and from victims of the electric chair
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But there I was, heading east on 44,
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getting pelted by hailstones the size of BARN DOORS
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so, of course, NONE of them were missing..
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It was as if GOD was keeping score,
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and THE HEAVENS were thundering their approval...
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Thats when I suggested our hasty removal
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Just a mile down the road, this rain of hailstones ceased
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and a vaacuum of silence brought a turbulent peace....
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The clouds started dAnCiNg, dressed up in taffeta green
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and enveloped the sky in a jungle party theme--
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There they gave birth to a barbed-wire wind
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Sandy was frozen, her face had a maniacal grin,
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A funnel cloud came roaring, cast down from the sky
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like the knife of the Devil but twenty stories high!
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Sandy broke from the car in a mad, desperation run
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to touch her sole fixation, this wheel where death was spun,
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and I could do but nothing, my heart came so undone
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for the host of twenty tornadoes,
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who died with twenty-one...
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Tornado GiRL!
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Ellis Paul |