Too Many Faces

You have the face of an angel
Your hands are like silk on my skin,
Baby I hate to be the one to tell you that
you have NO idea where my hands have been
And I’ve been busting up bottles
All day because they remind me of what I’m
Going home to tonight. Again.
Fiddle strings and broken family ties and
The reason that she drinks so much has nothing to do with  me,
No, it has something to do with you and the way you
Make me cry
And the way she feels like she should know
Why I spend my days out in the dark
She doesn’t know what I do,
Maybe I’m a junkie. No, maybe I’mma flunk out.
No, maybe I’ll end up like her on the east side of west harlem
Hitching a ride on a jam packed bus full of
Evil at its sweetest and wrapped in paper
Dripping yesterday’s headlines and tomorrow’s sidewalk massacre.
Maybe its because my high school experience
Isn’t quite like yours
Because I don’t have the drive you do
And we have to drive to get anywhere
Well baby, maybe it’s high time for you to understand
That I don’t slap you harder when you grab me from behind
Because I was working all night long behind the picket lines
Of the dreams that I keep hidden from the light we know so well
You show me different faces every day and I still don’t understand you
How I’m supposed to tell when you change, when you smile,
Take the clay off of your eyes and maybe I could see the tears
But all that I can see is the letter that you fear you’re gonna get
Because that paper wasn’t good enough
The inked leaked through onto the table
And you’re just not ready yet
To hear me tell you no and
I know I must be stupid because I don’t raise my hand in class
The way I used to when I thought it mattered
But since that day on the 106
When the woman in the trashbag acid raincoat with the bright baby blues
Turned around and told me to get out while I still could
And I still just can’t concentrate on lines and metaphoric equations that place the lines that hold us in this overly nostalgic garden of eden
Where all the apples are shiny and the snakes wear Abercrombie and fitch
And if you don’t agree then I guess you must be a bitch
Because you think you’re better than us,
No, I think I’m smarter than you
Because I listened to the woman with the bright baby blues
And I’m getting out while I can still really get out,
Before the war comes home
And everybody notices
That I’ve been fighting it all along,
Through the peepholes in my heart
Carved by the scope on a telephone made in 1960
And I dial just to listen to the mechanical breathing
That is nowhere anymore
Why write when you can type it?
I never need to talk to anyone face to face again
You all live behind this screen
Dancing the robot and speaking in automated tongues from somewhere
Way out in India where no one has a real job
And nobody get killed because it isn’t on the news,
And we can’t trust it if it isn’t glossed and stapled
To a picture of the girl that you should look like by the time you’re 21,
Why bother constructing sentences
When this anti-instructive world of inadvertent hopefulness in inconvenient places
I’d like to tell you that I love you,
How I’ll miss you when you’re dead
You know we’ll have been clicking away all night long,
Just to head off the agony before it reaches the knife I stuck in the road
To remind where to lay down under the blade
And start praying
If you make it to heaven someday you’ll see
Us all down on our knees and remembering words
we know we lied through
Telling you how beautiful you were and
how we loved your stories,
Though I’m not sure I ever really believed a word of your worries,
I’d like to say I missed you but
I never knew you all that well
And every night before I close my eyes
and see the fireworks
Of the minefield hallways that we’re walking every day
I hope I’ll see you in the morning
Just so I can say that I woke up and you were really there.