LYRIC FOR SALE

By Callum H

There’s a crack in the kitchen window
That we never got around to mend
You can see the garden through it
Like the house is trying to let you in.

And there’s a coffee cup by the sink
With a lipstick mark gone pale
Funny how the smallest things
Are the things that never fail.

The old man keeps his wages
In an envelope inside a shoe
Said a bank could lose your money
And then what would you do?

He’d come home smelling of diesel
With the rain caught in his hair
And he’d kiss his wife at the doorway
Like he’d been gone for years.

We carry what we can’t put down
We drag it through the years
A pocket full of photographs
A mouthful of old fears,
You can leave a town, change your name
Put distance on the road
But the things you learn to carry
Are the things you never owe.

I knew a man who loved a woman
Who could never quite love him back
He bought her flowers every Friday
And she kept them in a coffee can.

He said “Hope is just a habit,
You get good at it if you try”,
Then he laughed like he’d remembered
Something funny ‘bout the lie.

Now the man has a boy who asks him
“How does the moon follow the car?”
He tells him it’s a trick of distance
He says “I know what stars are”.

And he thinks about the answers
That I never got from mine
How a man can spend his whole life
Trying to finish one good line.

We carry what we can’t put down
We drag it through the years
A pocketful of photographs
A mouthful of old fears.
You can leave a town, change your name
Put distance on the road
But the things you learn to carry
Are the things you never owe.

So if you see me at the doorway
With my coat still on at night
It’s not that I don’t want to stay here
I’m just learning how to arrive
And if I can’t say what I’m thinking
Well I’ve said enough to know
That some truths need a little weather
Before they begin to show.

We carry what we can’t put down
Like a river carries rain
Every kindness, every failure
Every ordinary pain.
And maybe getting older
Isn’t learning to let go
Maybe it’s deciding carefully
What things are worth the load.

There’s a crack in the kitchen window
And the evening’s coming through
I can see the garden clearly now
And I think I always could.