Banks

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
 200 miles from Chicago, there is blood on the windshield
 And I'm 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
 As 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
 Save it for a rainy day and maybe then you'll see
 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 shine
 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
 And 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