Banks - Lincoln

Milemarker twenty-seven says we’re on the way to Heaven

And I smile at the passenger seat

Forty miles from Chicago

There is snow on the windshield

And you’re downtown dragging your feet

Now I’m circling the block around Union Central Station

And there are bullets flying into the car

It’s the same as it’s always been

It’s the same as it’s always been

Two-hundred miles from Chicago:

There is blood on the windshield

And I am reeling as you gather your things

I said I don’t know what to do anymore

As if I knew what to do before

I can fuck up almost anything

I don’t think that I would exactly call it love

But it’s dripping down my consciousness

Missus, you’re slipping down my lungs

I want to build you a protest out of sticks and rocks

I find in the backyard behind the house you grew up in

In loving memory of all our nonconformity

I want to sing you a signal that reaches only the ears

Of young disenfranchised straight white boys

Because that would feel normal, and none of this does

I don’t think that I would exactly call it love

But it’s dripping down my consciousness

As you’re slipping down my lungs

So save it for a rainy day and maybe then you’ll see

That I am like the earth, old man, there’s no way around me

But even in my dreams

I still don’t know the difference between

What it is I want and what it is I need

I wanna see you be brave

I wanna see you surviving

I wanna see both of us

Prospering and thriving separately

I want the catharsis of knowing

Something bad’s about to happen

But also knowing that I can’t do anything about it

Because your new house just don’t shut

Quite like the one you grew up in used to

I wanna come and visit

I wanna see this through, but

I never will because you’re just not what I need

And I am just not what you want

Though you’re in everyone I meet and

We’ll say fuck the banks but we’ll still use them every day

And when we fight amongst ourselves

The banks will say «Okay

Have you been spending all your capital on causes you deem just?

You keep doing what you can, we’ll keep doing what we must.»

So despite what you have learned

In songs for which you’d take a bullet

You won’t find objective truth

In a final rhyming couplet

A couplet, a couplet, a couplet…