Steemit Open Mic Week 75 - Original Song "San Francisco Girl"

Very excited to be sharing this song with everybody this week. This tune is the opening song from my debut CD, Plain Jane. "San Francisco Girl" was written during a road trip I took just after I graduated from college. Some pals and I headed west from Michigan and drove all over the country, camping out and staying with friends along the way. We hooked up with a fellow Michigan State University alum who was a filmmaker in San Francisco. We stayed in the city for several days and nights exploring all the colorful, crazy neighborhoods that called the city home before the waves of gentrification that came with the excesses of the digital economy. In the early 1990s the City By the Bay looked a lot more like the birthplace of the hippies and the site of the poetry revolution embodied at City Lights Bookstore. Nowadays this song reads more like the remembrance of a place than a love song for a woman.

Lyrics -

You wear your make-up like Hemingway
You're a minimalist in every sense
You talk about yourself in third-person
Your future in present-tense
And your soft summer dresses hang so loose
But they don't hide your shape
You walk like a swan down on the pier
You're a swan among the apes
And the fishmonger's sons all call your name
You don't hear them through your curls
You're my beaded and baubled and beautiful baby
My San Fransisco Girl

You've read all your Jean-Paul Sartre
Your Kafka and your Camus
You're a philosopher in dungarees
And your a poet in plastic shoes
You carry your purse like a Catholic curse
Your bag it drags you down
It's filled with all the garbage and the trinkets and the junk
You need to get by in this town
And graffiti boys they paint your face
You don't see them through your curls
You're my tripped-out, flipped-out, drug-tongued baby
My San Francisco Girl

Your voice soft like the morning fog
Your laugh like a big brass band
You got seven silk scarves wrapped around your wrist
And velvet gloves on both your hands
You got a Spanish belt made of Cuban leather And a holster on your hip
You got Italian glasses made in Taiwan
To match your painted lips
And your face is sculpted in a block of salt
Behind your sticky, cherry curls
You're my lovely, lonely one and only
My San Francisco Girl

Black tights on white dancer's legs
Bone bracelets on your wrists
I love to watch your wooden toes
I love to see them twist
You got red roses landing at your feet
Tears in your sweet eyes
And your French perfume, just like a flower blooms
Whenever you walk by
Red ribbon streamers in your hair
Twistin' through your curls
Your my ballerina, my signorina
My San Francisco Girl

You can find all of my releases online at the usual places, but I'm also slowly getting everything uploaded to DSound. You can check out my second album, King there.