Philip Levine - Every Blessed Day lyrics

First with a gla** of water tasting of iron and then with more and colder water over his head he gasps himself awake. He hears the cheep of winter birds searching the snow for crumbs of garbage and knows exactly how much light and how much darkness is there before the dawn, gray and weak, slips between the buildings. Closing the door behind him, he thinks of places he has never seen but heard about, of the great desert his father said was like no sea he had ever crossed and how at dusk or dawn it held all the shades of red and blue in its merging shadows, and though his life was then a prison he had come to live for these suspended moments. Waiting at the corner he feels the cold at his back and stamps himself awake again. Seven miles from the frozen, narrow river. Even before he looks he knows the faces on the bus, some going to work and some coming back, but each sealed in its hunger for a different life, a lost life. Where he's going or who he is he doesn't ask himself, he doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off at the familiar corner, crosses the emptying parking lots toward Chevy Gear & Axle # 3. In a few minutes he will hold his time card above a clock, and he can drop it in and hear the moment crunching down, or he can not, for either way the day will last forever. So he lets it fall. If he feels the elusive calm his father spoke of and searched for all his short life, there's no way of telling, for now he's laughing among them, older men and kids. He's saying, "Damn, we've got it made." He's lighting up or chewing with the others, thousands of miles from their forgotten homes, each and every one his father's son.