Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

Diapers and Lighter Fluid

Who’s the drummer?
Everybody asks when they come into my house.
“I am”, I meekly answer.
But the truth is, I’m not.
I haven’t drummed in years.
Oh, I bang on them
every month or so.
But I haven’t been a drummer since I was sixteen.
“Who’s the musician”?
“I am.”
But I haven’t put out an album in two years
and when I do sit down to write songs
it is after I have finished doing all the other stuff
I have to do.
The truth is I don’t feel like a songwriter anymore.
I don’t feel like much of anything.
I am sitting in this house decaying
like the floor joists beneath me
getting moldy and creaking louder with each step.
I am tired of what my life is now.
The same phone calls.
The same fights.
The same mornings
that end with the same nights.
I am tired of pursuing a dream,
and wonder what I have been doing
all these years.
I thought I had gotten somewhere.
But now I feel like I’ve been in one of those lap pools
paddling and paddling
but really going no where.
I turn up the street to my house
like I have been doing for the past ten years
and wonder why I am still here.
It is dead here,
a suburbia of gossips
that aren’t interested in changing the world,
just diapers and lighter fluid.
Trouble is buried deep in the ground
and every reason I had for being here is gone.
I wish I had left when he did.