E


This is the fact, the implacable

one note, dancing in its own beat,

that you don’t love me,

or my friends are gone,

or everything you ever said to her

now seems so wrong.



A


This is standing next to where you were,

looking at the same bad way

things are. You can’t walk

across the room, call the cat a dog,

and get away with it.

An A chord won’t save your ass.



B


Nothing will.

Say what you’re gonna do.

Make up your mind. We wanna hear you do it.

Old men still standing at the end

of a dark red field picked clean of cotton,

young woman dancing with a stranger,

decades of us listening to that high chord,

we want to hear you say it,

because deep down we agree.

We know where you’re going with this.



E


You’re going home. No one will ever blame you.

Home. It’s broken, but you know where you are.

For a beat, you go back to the B Chord,

where it was clear, really onto something,

but this is where you live,

in your heartbeat, leaning into the next verse

like a disciple hunting deliverance

off the rhythm of a long black highway.