Joe Weil - Paunch lyrics

In the middle of getting dressed, ambushed by a mirror, I'm brought up halt and shamed before the paunch. It isn't a gut or beer belly, a spare tire or love handles, but something sinister, something beyond the often tender misshapenness of me. Suddenly, I'm not young anymore and that twenty-five-year-old poet who liked my work, who spoke with a voice like dusk, who swept waves of thick jet hair from her face as she spoke, really only liked my work. How awful. How sad to be entering the realm of the fathers. There is no hope unless it be a twig of slippery elm, a perfectly blue dinner plate, a flower I don't remember ever seeing that gives off the spice of a woman's sun-warmed back. Where are those magical things? How to find them? And if I should master the elements, what then? I'd still be Prospero at best, that old bag of tricks, vengeful, clinging to his beautiful daughter. Sit ups are, of course, out of the question. This goes way beyond fitness. This is the one grey hair I spend mornings searching for and pluck like a fat autumn shrew from its lair. Fierce and merciless like an owl, I hover over the ruins of my life. Trying to s** the demon in, I fall three waist lines short of Valhalla. Christ have mercy! Keep me far from mirrors and voices like dusk in which the Angelus rings and the stars rise, for I am only a poet, a fat poet heartsick with desire and fastened to a dying animal.