"oh, my morning's coming back, the whole world's waking up"
"I'm wide awake, it's morning."
Your pacing's lived in my head all night
Old shoes against new floor
Surrounded by faces,
you're lonely as all hell.
And there's nothing out here but everything
that there is when nothing's left.
And the weather is brutal this time of year
But you stand on the porch in the dead of the night.
You say if God's real he'd tell you to come back in
and that you're just waiting for a sign.
We've been counting the street signs,
the fences and the cows.
Liquidations, hurricane malls, old gas stations,
Sweet Southern tea and the down-home Americana.
My high school ring's around my finger,
on my right hand that you hold,
and I've got my red right hand around your throat.
Curse my bad circulation 'cause it's making your neck cold,
under your pin-pierced collar of the shirt that was your father's
that you hemmed into your size.
Curse the way that nothing lasts forever,
and how we're too young to be so old.
We'll throw the party in the cemetery down the street,
and I'll walk with you to where you hope I'll bury you someday.
The heavens open up and split the sky in two,
and this is our exit, so I'll just be waiting on you
to change your mind.
So we exit stage left, and I'm tracing your face
The heavy, weary darkness and all of the handsome lines
And it just seems so familiar
Trying to keep it all in mind.
They killed me the same way they killed the radio star
Cassette players, or MTV
A gentle suffocation and a gradual descent
into cultural irrelevancy.
Your time comes to fade from the public eye
So you go out of fashion,
And learn all the different ways to spell "alone"
But they say the trends always come back around
in the next twenty years or so.
When we go back into fashion, will we be cheap imitations?
In a mall kiosk we'll sit wrapped in plastic,
like fish at the market immobile on ice.
You laugh in the dark over chemical dyes,
about how the world's done you wrong.
How you're just the same as everyone else,
but no one can see that for beans,
so you might as well make your own way.
Putting your arm around your imaginary girlfriend, you say
that there's no winning or losing in playing these games
so you might as well just make your own way.
You play by house rules and you're playing for keeps
and the house always wins, but you don't care.
Your voice is high and sweet, low like you've been gargling rocks
and you're tired of following directions
'cause they always say you're still lost
and knowing you're not alone is no help.
You're washing your hands in a cold marble sink,
and vowing under your breath how you'll stand up for yourself
this time, to make up for all the other times that you did not.
There's blood under your nails,
but you don't care
about blood shed from hands that belong to no one.
So you just wash it away.