In Between The Living

In between jobs

He’s going to come home

And stink like dish soap

You get me my cigarettes?

Yeah, I got ‘em

Leave ‘em near the stove

I might want to smoke later

But I won’t

I’ll just leave ‘em there

And smoke 'em
On my break at work

You got to test yourself

Every now and then

See how far you can take it

He has a jar for his tips

That he keeps up in his room

Stashed away

So I can’t find it

He still remembers

When I smashed his piggy bank

And took all his change

So we could pay rent that month

Some mothers do that kind of shit

And buy drugs

Get drunk

Spend it on themselves

I just needed to pay rent

So I don’t feel bad

For Piggy

. . . . .

Maybe I feel a little bad

You got to leave room for regret

In between the living

If you move and move and move

You'll wind up somewhere

But it’s not usually

Where you want to be

I wound up with a kid

And a guy I can’t find

His father

And the rent

And a broken piggy bank

Now we got a tip jar

And I’m not supposed to know

Where it is

...But I do

The tip jar I leave alone

Even when we can’t make the rent

Now I just talk to the landlord

I explain some things to him

And sometimes he’s nice

And when he’s nice

We get a few extra days

And when he’s not nice...

...I think about the tip jar

But…

I figure it out

Takes me awhile, but…

I figure it out

On my smoke breaks at work

I do the numbers

I add

I subtract

I told my kid

To be good at math
And he is

He’s got a good head for that

Better than me even

And he’s got a way of looking at people

Women, especially

Probably comes from being raised by...

Absence makes more of an impression

Than impact

That’s what the sign says

At the counselor’s office
Where I work

I think about all the people we had
In our lives

Me and my kid

I can count ‘em all

On two fingers

And then I think about--

The other people

The absent people

The ones who never showed up

And yeah

It’s true

All that absence

It makes one hell

Of an impression