Waste Of Paint
I have a friend, he's mostly made of painHe wakes up, drives to work and straight back home againHe once cut one of my nightmares out of paperI thought it was beautiful, I put it on a record coverAnd I tried to tell him that he had a senseOf color and composition so magnificentAnd he said thank you, please, but your flatteryIt is truly not becoming meYour eyes are poor, you're blind, you seeNo beauty ever could have come from meI'm a wasteOf breath, of space, of time
I knew a woman she was dignified and trueHer love for her man was one of her many virtuesUntil one day she found out that he had liedAnd decided the rest of her life from that point on would be a lieShe was grateful for everything that had happenedAnd she was anxious for all that would come nextBut then she wept, what did you expectIn that big old house with the cars she keptSuch is life, she often saidWith one day leading to the nextYou get a little closer to your deathWhich was fine with her, she never got upsetAnd with all the days she may have leftShe would never clean another messOr fold his shirts, or look her bestShe was freeTo waste away alone
Last night my brother, he got drunk and droveAnd this cop, he pulled him off to the side of the roadAnd he said officer, officer, you've got the wrong manNo, no, I'm a student of medicine, a son of a banker, you don't understandThe cop said No one got hurt, you should be thankfulAnd your carelessness, it is something awfulAnd no I can't just let you goAnd though your father's name is knownYour decisions now are yours aloneYou're nothing but a stepping stone on a pathTo debt, to loss, to shame
The last few months I've been living with this coupleYeah, you know the kind who buy everything in doublesYeah, they fit together like a puzzleI love their love and I am thankfulThat someone actually receives the prize that was promisedBy all those fairy tales that drugged usAnd still do me I'm sick, lonelyNo laurel tree, just green envyWill my number come up eventuallyLike love's some kind of lotteryWhere you scratch and see what's underneathIt's sorryJust one cherryI'll play again, get lucky
So now I hang out down by the train's depotNo, I don't ride, I just sit and watch the people thereThey remind me of wind-up cars in motionThe way they spin and turn and jockey for positionsAnd I wanna scream out that it all is nonsenseTheir life's one track and can't they see it's pointless?But just then my knees give under meMy head feels weak and suddenlyIt's clear to see, it's not them, but meWho's lost my self-identityAs I hide behind these books I readWhile scribbling my poetryLike art could save a wretch like meWith some ideal ideologyThat no one could hope to achieveAnd I'm never real, it's just a sketch of meAnd everything I've made is trite and cheap and a wasteOf paintOf tapeOf time
So I park my car down by the cathedralWhere the floodlights point up at the steeplesChoir practice is filling up with peopleI hear the sound escaping as an echoSloping off the ceiling at an angleWhen the voices blend they sound like angelsI hope there's some room still in the middleBut when I lift my voice up now to reach themThe range is too high way up in heavenSo I hold my tongue, forget the songTie my shoes, start walking offAnd try to just keep moving onWith my broken heart and my absent godAnd I have no faith but it's all I wantTo be lovedAnd believeIn my soul, in my soul