No one wants to hear
what I have to say.
So cover your ears
as I say it anyway.
I don’t want your tears.
I want you to stay.
Stay, right here
as I go this away.
My body is heady,
now, my toenail is brown.
My belly’s already
In a bar downtown.
I still have ideas
I just dont write them down.
Or if I do I dig
another hole in the ground.
I’m standing in my betters
in cigarette smoke.
Cutting into letters
every word I spoke
when life was fighting
and death was a joke.
Now I circle the wagon
around a bruise I poke.
Turns out, if I might
have been wise when young,
it was by accident, quite
and then, only by tongue.
It wasn’t wisdom, twas faith
that sang what I sung.
My glory was a fool’s
and a fool’s glory comes undone.
Always, the writer
I’d say what I thought.
A terrible hider.
I wanted to get caught!
I knew I was innocent
even if I was not.
I loved naive.
I believed what I thought.
But I never thought
a single truth about age.
I knew not.
I was writing the page.
So I wrote “some day
I’ll be a wise old sage”
I had no idea then
and less of one today!
CHORUS
If you don’t hang your gloves, you’re gonna get beat.
If you can’t take the hill, you gotta retreat.
Fight gravity, if you will, but there’s no way to cheat.
Nobody’s still at the top of the heap