Waste Of Paint

I have a friend, he's mostly made of pain He wakes up, drives to work and straight back home again He once cut one of my nightmares out of paper I thought it was beautiful, I put it on a record cover And I tried to tell him he had a sense Of color and composition so magnificent And he said, "Thank you, please But your flattery It's truly not becoming me Your eyes are poor, you're blind you see No beauty could have come from me I'm a waste Of breath, of space, of time" I knew a woman, she was dignified and true Her love for her man was one of her many virtues Until one day she found out that he had lied And decided the rest of her life from that point on would be a lie She was grateful for everything that had happened And she was anxious for all that would come next But then she wept, what did you expect? In that big old house with the car she kept And, "Such is life," she often said With one day leading to the next You get a little closer to your death Which was fine with her, she never got upset And with all the days she may have left She would never clean another mess Or fold his shirts or look her best She was free To waste away alone Last night, my brother he got drunk and drove And this cop pig pulled him off to the side of the road And he said, "Officer, officer, you've got the wrong man No, no, I'm a student of medicine, a son of a banker, you don't understand" The cop said, "No one got hurt, you should be thankful And your carelessness, it is something awful And no, I can't just let you go And though your father's name is known Your decisions now are yours alone You're nothing but a stepping stone On a path To debt, to loss, to shame" The last few months I've been living with this couple Yeah, you know the kind who buy everything in doubles Yeah, they fit together like a puzzle I love their love, and I am thankful That someone actually receives the prize that was promised By all those fairy tales that drugged us And still do me, I'm sick, lonely No laurel tree, just green envy Will my number come up eventually? Like love's some kind of lottery Where you scratch and see what's underneath It's sorry, just one cherry I'll play again, get lucky So now I hang out down by the train's depot No, I don't ride, I just sit and watch the people there They remind me of windup cars in motion The way they spin and turn and jockey for positions And I want to scream out that it all is nonsense And their life's one track and can't they see it's pointless? But just then my knees give under me My head feels weak and suddenly It's clear to see it's not them but me Who's lost my self-identity And I hide behind these books I read While scribbling my poetry Like art could save a wretch like me With some ideal ideology That no one could hope to achieve And I'm never real, it's just a sketch of me And everything I've made is trite and cheap And a waste Of paint, of tape, of time So I park my car down by the cathedral Where the floodlights point up at the steeples Choir practice is filling up with people I hear the sound escaping as an echo Sloping off the ceiling at an angle When the voices blend they sound like angels I hope there's some room still in the middle But when I lift my voice up now to reach them The range is too high way up in heaven So I hold my tongue, forget the song Tie my shoes, start walking off And try to just keep moving on With my broken heart and my absent God And I have no faith but it's all I want To be loved, and believe In my soul, in my soul