This month, Blue Rider Press will publish Forever Words: The Unknown Poems of Johnny Cash. Compiled from a mountain of Cash’s handwritten poetry (all unpublished), the work in Forever Words spans the many stages of Cash’s career. “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” is one of many pieces within that reflect Cash’s “humorous strand,” poet Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction. It reflects “Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering.”

Christmas 1982

If anybody made a movie out of my life

I wouldn’t like it, but I’d watch it twice

If they halfway tried to do it right

There’d be forty screen writers workin’ day and nite

They’d need a research team from Uncle Sam

And go from David Allen Coe to Billy Graham

It would run ten days in the final cut

And that would mean leaving out the gossip smut

And I do request for my children’s sake

Don’t ever let ’em do a new re-make

The thing I’m sayin’ is, don’t you see,

Don’t make a movie ’bout me

Even for T.V.

Don’t make a movie ’bout me

Don’t let ’em drag old Hickory Lake

For my telephones and bottles and roller skates

Down forty feet in the Cumberland mud

There’s a rusty old gun that once shed blood

Out a hundred yards from my lakeside house

Weighted down with a rock is a skirt and blouse

A dozen pair of boots that made a dozen corns

Trombones, trumpets, harmonicas and horns

And the tapes that I threw from the lakeside door

Silverstein, and Kristofferson from years before

Everything has a story that should be let be

So don’t make a movie ’bout me

If they’re hot on a book called Man in Black

Tell ’em I’ve got the rights and won’t give back

If you don’t know my tune you can’t get it right

I don’t talk about me in Man in White

Truth, said the Master, cannot be hid

But he didn’t say slap it in the face of my kids.

A stone is a stone and forever a stone

But I’m part good and bad and then I’m gone

There is no sin cleaner than the dirtiest

So there’s a lot about me that I don’t want missed

If it’s days or years or whatever will be

Don’t make a movie ’bout me

Aw, I might as well face it cause they will some day

So while I can I’ve got a thing to say

I don’t know anybody that I said I don’t know

And there ain’t anybody anywhere I owe

The I.R.S. gets the lion’s share

And what is left goes to my own named heirs

Don’t let ’em make it in Hollywood

If they must, tell ’em Arkansas is where they should

Here’s a hex on whoever makes it be,

So don’t make a movie ’bout me

For Love or Monee

Don’t make a movie ’bout me

From Forever Words: The Unknown Poems by Johnny Cash, to be published on November 15 by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Foreword copyright © 2016 by John Carter Cash.