Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)

(album: Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground - 2002)

Well, the animals laugh from the dark of the wilderness.
A baby cries hard in an apartment complex,
as I pass in a car buried under the influence.
The city's driving me out of my mind.
I've seen a child is caught in the sad trap of gravity.
He falls from the lowest branch of the apple tree
and lands in the grass and weeps for his dignity.
Next time he will not aim so high.
Yeah, next time, neither will I.
Now a mother takes loans out, sends her kids off to colleges.
Her family's reduced to names on a shopping list.
While, a coroner kneels beneath a great, wooden crucifix.
He knows there's worse things than being alone.
And so I've learned to retreat at the first sign of danger.
I mean, why wait around, if it's just to surrender?
An ambition, I've found, can lead only to failure.
I do not read the reviews.
No, I am not singing for you.
Well I stood dropping a coin into the pit of a well.
And I would throw my whole billfold if I thought it would help.
With all these wishes I make,
I should buy something real, at least a telephone call home.
Well, my teachers, they built this retaining wall of memory,
all those multiple choices I answered so quickly.
And got my grades back and forgot just as easily,
but as least I got an A.
And so I don't have them to blame.
Well I should stop pointing fingers;
reserve my judgment of all those public action figures,
the cowboy presidents.
So loud behind the bullhorn, so proud they can't admit
when they've made a mistake.
While poison ink spews from a speechwriter's pen,
he knows he don't have to say it,
so it, it don't bother him.
"Honesty", "Accuracy" is just "Popular Opinion."
And the approval rating's high,
and so someone's gonna die.
Well ABC, NBC, CBS: Bullshit.
They give us fact or fiction? I guess an even split.
And each new act of war is tonight's entertainment.
We're still the pawns in their game.
As they take eye for an eye until no one can see,
we must stumble blindly forward, repeating history.
Well, I guess we all fit into your slogan
on the fast food marquee:
Red blooded, White skinned oh and the Blues.
Oh and the Blues, I got the Blues! That's me! That's me!
Well, I awoke in relief.
My sheets and tubes were all tangled weak from whiskey and pills,
in a Chicago hospital.
And my father was there, in a chair, by the window, staring so far away.
I tried talking, just whispered, "...so sorry...so selfish..."
He stopped me and said, "Child I love you regardless
and there's nothing you could do that would ever change this.
I'm not angry. It happens. But you just can't do it again."
So now I try to keep up, I've been exchanging my currency.
While a million objects pass through my periphery.
Now I'm rubbing my eyes 'cause they're starting to bother me.
I've been staring too long at the screen.
But where was it when I first heard a sweet sound of humility?
It came to my ears in the goddamn loveliest melody.
How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery,
to love and to be loved. Let's just hope that is enough.