St. Louis

Past the beaten, broken, abandoned houses
It’s sink or swim;
Taping up your knuckles
and climbing back into the ring.
For a workman’s wages
slugging it out in St. Louis;
Life is not your own
without the chances that you take
Lost in darkness, maps unfolded on midnight’s moonless night;
Laughing, I…
turned on the lights.
Eventually we’ll all lose every
single thing we love
And a heart that’s beating
is chained and cheated
by every single desire.
But we can beat death while we’re still alive
Sometimes
White german shepard, trailer park,
dirt yard and a chain-link fence.
My dad never learned to bend,
now he’s a broken scarecrow in tornado winds
with two-by-four shingles transformers scattered in gravel, evening rain
Life is not your own without every single mistake that you’ve made
And vision isn’t sight to see what’s inside;
We all keep a blind eye;
Searchlights turned outward
to an endless sea of change
Eventually we’ll all lose every
single thing we love
And a heart that’s beating
is chained and cheated
by every single desire.
But we can beat death while we’re still alive
Sometimes