When I was 8 years old, I used to roll a slinky
Down the stairs
Of my very old, very rickety house,
An incomplete mobius strip of metal
Rolling and folding over itself
Down the green carpet wrapped around those stairs
Carpet that had been laid before the invention of vacuums,
And you could tell
With every exhalation of dust
My slinky looked a thousand years old
By the time it found solid ground.
When I was 17 years old,
Those creaking stairs were an alarm system
Of squeaking,
Making it impossible to sneak
Out on the town
In search of a brown bottle
To drown my troubles.
Now I'm not trying to get any sympathy,
And I know if I was, you'd all turn on me
Like a record being flipped.
And I know unrequited love is a package that's shipped
To the wrong address
And it'll probably get lost
In the post office
At the bottom of the bag...
Maybe I shouldn't have sent you that ballgag
Regardless, my intentions were pure
And even though you can't take a picture
They are worth a thousand words,
All jumbled and mixed
Like a ransom note cut
Out of a dozen magazines,
Again lost at the bottom of that bag
Right next to your ballgag.
Okay, last chance to plead my case
But I'm getting tripped up by that gorgeous facebook
Status you posted where you said birds
Were love notes from God.
Now I've never talked to God
But what kind of benevolent, all powerful deity
Would send a love note that ***** on your car?
Not me, and I'll go so far
As to say that's a really stupid idea.
And while I'll never **** on your car,
I will take you to a ****** bar
And get so drunk that
I'll tell you the sun rises in your hair
And your hips are a valley
In which I will fear no evil
Because obviously God's on my side this time.
Maybe he's trying to make up for that time
I accidentally elbowed my
Soon to be ex in the face during ***
Or that time my dad hit me so hard
That I don't remember what happened next.
I guess all's fair in love and beer
And all I really needed was to hear
Your heart beating like a kettle drum
While we wait for the sun
To come up.
And I told you every secret I had
Thinking maybe if someone else knew
It wouldn't hurt so bad.
So we laid in the bed
And we smoked 'til we choked
Until the morning peeked in
Like a registered *** offender
And those ****** love notes told us
The fantasy was over
Done, finished, goodbye, gone
And while I thought we had really bonded
You absconded with the piece of my heart
Labeled "not for resale"
I don't know what you're gonna do with that part
Is there a black market for broken hearts?
Cause I'll gladly trade for a cracked glass vessel
That pumps nearly perfectly
Except for a small leak
That makes you think the world
Can be fixed.
Even though chemistry taught me faults exist
When impure compounds are mixed
And the best to which we can aspire
Is
Balance