He had potential like a loaded gun nobody fired
Got a drawer full of notebooks, every page uninspired
Not from lack of talent — talent’s practically leaking
It’s the distance between dreaming and the doing that’s defeating
Alarm goes off at seven
He negotiates till ten
Makes a deal with yesterday
To try again again
It isn’t laziness exactly
More like standing at the edge
Of everything you could’ve been
Too scared to jump too scared to step back from the ledge
Beautiful and useless:
Like a sports car in a town with nowhere worth the drive
Beautiful and useless:
Got the engine, got the hunger, barely keeping it alive
All the right ingredients
For something no one’s ever seen
Beautiful and useless
And the gap between the two
Is everything
His friends are buying houses, having kids, making moves
He’s still got the same guitar and the same set of excuses
Told himself that he was waiting for the moment to be right
Been waiting since his twenties, now he’s waiting every night
There’s a version of tomorrow
Where he finally starts the thing
But tomorrow’s got a waiting room
And he keeps missing when they call his name
And the cruelest part of all of it
Isn’t that he doesn’t care
It’s that he cares so much
It paralyzes everything down to the air
He picks the guitar up sometimes
Late enough that no one’s listening
Plays something that would stop a room
Then puts it back like evidence
Like if he doesn’t finish it
It can’t be judged as less than perfect
And perfect is the cage he built
From everything he swore that he deserved
So the notebooks stay half-written
And the canvas stays half-white
And the man stays half-alive
In a fully wasted life
That could’ve been
God it could’ve been
Something
Still could be
Still could be
He says it to the ceiling every night
Still could be
Still could
Still
…