The Lean Years Lyrics

The old days look so rich
Resplendent in retrospect
Your milky lenses reflect, refract
Glinting with the sweat of the lean years
When you're sliced up whip-thin
No more marbled fat, just gristle and fear

You were swollen with moments to lose, when
The digits dialed up their demand: "Choose:"
"Trade time for our tender or fade like a bruise,"
So you fed yourself in, you fed yourself in

And everything's efficient now
You praise the daily miracles
That tumble from each slice of blue
Light that models, fosters fools

Oh, you know it felt just fine
To live surveilled, revealed inside
Each thought coded and catalogued
To hide nothing, nothing at all

And what a subtle price you paid
Grey flab strip-mined like clay
For canny chips to carve away

And those artfully arbitraged wounds
Seeped spirit into the gloom
Where sieves abide, unseen by your side
Discerning the churning, confined lusts that drive you

And when your flensed focus ran thin
Your shameful suckling began
With thirst unslaked, you'd take and take
The patent cures and devil's bargains

So in the end, those fatty folds
Weren't worth so much at all
Just another flipped commodity
One more thing your old self owned

But God, you were so rich
In the head, way back
Not broke, blind, or slack
Like the lean years