Ani DiFranco Album

'Tis of thee

They caught the last poor man
On a poor man's vacation
They cuffed him and confiscated his stuff
They dragged his black ass down to the station
And said, ok, the streets are safe now
All your pretty white children can come out and see spot run
And they came out of their houses
And they looked around
But they didn't see no one

My country 'tis of thee
To take swings at each other on the talkshow TV
Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
Cuz we'll never live long enough
To undo everything they've done to you
Undo everything they've done to you

Above 96th street
They're handing out smallpox blankets so people don't freeze
The old dogs have got a new trick
It's called criminalize the symptoms
While you spread the disease
And I hold on hard to something
Between my teeth when I'm sleeping
I wake up and my jaw aches
And the earth is full of earthquakes

My country 'tis of thee
To take swings at each other on the talkshow tv
Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
Cuz we'll never live long enough
To undo everything they've done to you
Undo everything they've done to you

They caught the last poor man
Flying away in a shiny red cape
They took him down to the station
And they said, boy, you should've known better
Than to try to escape
I ran away with the circus
Cuz there's still some honest work left for bearded ladies
Since they put everyone in jail
Exceot the cleavers and the brady's

My country 'tis of thee
To take swings at each other on the talkshow tv
Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
Cuz we'll never live long enough
To undo everything they've done to you
Undo everything they've done to you

Virtue is relative at best
There's nothing worse than a sunset
When you're driving due west 
And I'm afraid that my love
Is gonna come up short
There is no there there
I guess I'm scared
Cuz I want to have good news to report
Every time I come up for air

Now I'm cruising through a chromakey blue sky
And I know that in an hour or three
The sun is gonna be in my eyes
And I know that sometimes all I can see
Is how I feel
Like the whole world is on the other side of a dirty windshield
And I'm tryin to see through the glare
Yes I'm struggling just to see what's there

The one person who really knows me best
Says I'm like a cat
Yeah the kind of cat that you just can't pick up
And throw into your lap
No, the kind that doesn't mind being held
Only when its her idea
Yeah, the kind that feels what she decides to feel
When she is good and ready to feel it

And now I am prowling through the backyard
And I am hiding under the car
I have gotten out of everything
I've gotten into so far
I eat when I am hungry
And I travel alone
And just outside the glow of the house
Is where I feel most at home

But in the window you sometimes appear
And your music is faint in my ears

Come
Come away
Come away from
Come away from it

Next to the glass ashtray
In a little plastic baggy
Is a bitter rock remedy
Really good stuff
But I take offense to the fact
That you're so hell bent
Are you trying to tell me this world
Just isn't beautiful enough?

Do you want to get off?
Is this your stop?
Do you gotta have a tripledecker super fudge sundae
With a goddamn cherry on top?
I mean, what makes you so lavish
That you can afford
To spend every sober moment feeling angry and bored

Why don't you come
Come away
Come away from it
Why?

We used to hold hands down
Those unfamiliar streets
You used to take me diving
Into the watery blue deep
But now you're trying to find every tiny treasure
Every shiny penny of pleasure
Satisfy every selfish purpose
Before you swim back up to the surface

Why don't you come
Come away
Come away from it

You think that I just don't like it anymore
But I'll tell you what I don't like
I don't like that I had to put the training wheels
Back onto your bike
And I don't like the extravagance
Or the way you taste when I kiss you
I don't like being left alone
Baby, don't you think I miss you?

Why don't you come
Come away
Come away from it
Why?

In the jukebox of her memory
The list of names flips by and stops
She closes her eyes
And smiles as the record drops

Then she drinks herself up and out
Of her kitchen chair
And she dances out of time
As slow as she can sway
For as long as she can say 
This dance is mine
This dance is mine

Her hair bears silent witness
To the passing of time
Tattoos like mile markers
Map the distance she has gone
Winning some, losing some
She says my sister still calls every Sunday night
After the rates go down
And I can never manage to say anything right
My whole life blew up
And now its all coming down

And she says leave me alone
Tonight I just wanna stay home
She fills the pot with water
She drops in the bone
She says, I've got a darkness that I have to feed
I've got a sadness
That grows up around me like a weed
And I'm not hurting anyone
I'm just spiraling in
As she closes her eyes
And hears the song begin again

She appreciates the phone calls
The consoling cards and such
She appreciates all the people
Who come by and try to pull her back in touch
They try to hold the lid down tightly
And they try to shake well
But the oil and water
Just want to separate themselves

She drinks herself up and out of her kitchen chair
And she dances out of time
As slow as she can sway
For as long as she can say
This dance is mine
This dance is mine
This dance is mine

If the mattress was a table top
And the bed sheet was a page
We'd be written out
Like a couple of question marks
My convex to your concave
And we'd be lying here
At the end of a sentence
And asks, are you ready now?
Are you gonna glow in the dark?
Are you gonna show me how?

Do you like to watch when water misbehaves?
Do you like waves?
As the wind shifts
And shifts again
The sail smiles
And gently slaps around the mast
Ballast
Ballast
Ballast

When you come to me 
Come to me with cake
In your pocket
Come to me nicely
With that soft kinda cake
That's mostly icing
Come to me ready and rude
Bring me angel food
Angel food

Growing up it was just me and my mom
Against the world
And all my sympathies were with her
When I was a little girl
But now I've seen both my parents
Play out the hands they were dealt
And as each year goes by
I know more about how my father must have felt

I just want you to understand
That I know what all the fighting was for
And I just want you to understand
That I'm not angry anymore
I'm not angry anymore

She taught me how to wage a cold war
With quiet charm
But I just want to walk
Through my life unarmed
To accept and just get by
Like my father learned to do
But without all the acceptance and getting by
That got my father through

Night falls like people into love
We generate our own light
To compensate
For the lack of light from above
Every time we fight
A cold wind blows our way

But we learn like the trees
How to bend
How to sway and say

I, I think I understand
What all this fighting is for
And baby, I just want you to understand
That I'm not angry anymore
No, I'm not angry anymore

From the depth of the pacific
To the height of Everest
And still the world is smoother 
Than a shiny ball-bearing
So I take a few steps back 
And put on a wider lens
And it changes your skin, 
Your sex, and what your wearing
Distance shows your silloutte 
To be a lot like mine
Like a sphere is a sphere 
And all of us here have been here all the time

You brought me to church, 
Cinder blocks, flourescent light
You brought me to church 
At 7o'clock on a Sunday night
And the band was rocking 
And the floors were scrubbed clean
And everybody had a tambourine

So I took a deep breath and became 
The white girl with the hair
And you sat right beside me 
While everybody stared
And through the open window 
I think the singing went outside
And floated up to tell 
all the stars not to hide
Cuz by the time church let out 
The sky was much clearer 
And the moon was so beautiful, 
That the ocean held up a mirror

As we walked home we spoke slowly
We spoke slow, 
And we spoke lowly
Like it was taking more time 
Than usual to choose
The words to go 
With your squeaky sandle shoes
Like time is not a thing 
That's ours to lose 

From the height of the pacific
To the depths of everest

Up up up up up up points the
Spire of the steeple
But god's work isn't done by god
It's done by people

Up up up up up up points the
Fingers of the trees
The lumberjacks with their bloody axes
Are on their knees

And just when you think that you've got enough
Enough grows
And everywhere that you go in life
Enough knows

Up up up up up up dances 
The steam from the sewer
As she rounds the corner
The brutal wind blows right through her

Up up up up up up raises 
The stakes of the game
Each day sinks its bootprint into her clay
And she's not the same

And just when you think that you've got enough
Enough grows
And everywhere that you go in life
Enough knows

Half of learning how to play
Is learning what not to play
And she's learning the spaces she leaves
Have their own things to say
Then she's trying to sing just enough
So that the air around her moves
And make music like mercy
That gives what it is
And has nothing to prove

She crawls out on a limb
And begins to build her home
And it's enough just to look around
To know she's not alone

Up up up up up up points 
The spire of the steeple
But god's work isn't done by god
It's done by people

It's not so much that we got closer
It's that her face just go bigger
And by the time it was filling up my whole view
I figured my face had got bigger too
So I used it to try and way her
Say something to her
Make my case
But my face
Never had a chance
All along it was the wrong song and dance

I just stood there
Without even a stance
Helpless to her advance
And her retreat
Backspace, delete

It wasn't so much that we fell in love as
My life just seemed to come down
To a slow walk on a straight line
Between her smile and her frown
And maybe we never were as close
As we should have been
But I didn't know what I now now, then
Yeah, I didn't know what I know now, then

You cease to smell the steel plant
After you've lived there for a while
Smoke is snow is ash are leaves that blow
Through the air aloft
All our houses dim their sliding
To the same soot gray style
And we hang our laundry out on Sundays
When they turn the furnaces off

Everybody's daddy works up on the line
The Stienbrenners and the Wilczewskis
Have been there the longest time
Everybody's mommy squints into the sun
Sunday afternoon after all the laundry's done

Sometimes a distant siren
Can set a dog to barking late at night
Then it dominos on down
Til every dog is joining in
The first rumours of the layoffs
Sang like a distant siren might
And we all perked up our ears
And paced the fence of the ensuing din

Every night, we were glued to the TV news
At six o'clock
Cuz it was hard to tell what was real
And what was talk
They explained about the cutbacks
All the earnest frowns
But what they didn't say was that the plant
Was slowly shutting down

This town is not the kind of place
That money people go
They make their jokes up on the tv
About all the snow
And they're building condos downriver
From where the plant had been
But nobody really lives here
Now that the air is clean

The president assured us
It was all gonna trickle down
Like it'd be raining so much money
That we'd be sad to see the sun
Mr. Wilczewski's brother had some business
Out in denver
So they left denver
And everybody knows they were the lucky ones

You cease to smell the steel plant
After you'v ebeen here for a while

In walked a man in the shape of a man
Holding a hat-shaped hat
He held up two fingers and said 'how many fingers?"
And I said 'Peace man, that's where it's at"
I said you are what you do in order to
Prevent becoming what you're busy not doing
And if you do do it truly 
Then you arrive at it newly
Then in the end you are absolved
And the problem of heaven is solved

And the man broke into a smile, 
Like he was breaking into a song
And he was broken and smiling 
And I was singing along
And we agreed completely agreetly about most things
'Til the sun set sweetly 
Like it does in those paintings
The ones they hang in hotel rooms
The ones they bolt to the wall
As though anyone would want to steal them at all

We talked like children without breathing
'Til I stopped this lady as she was leaving
And I said 'excuse me,
But do you know what time it would be 
If we were on mars ?'
And she held up her hand 
Like a crossing guard stopping the cars
And she said 
Five in the morning

in walked a man 
in the shape of a man
holding a hat shaped hat