I Feel Bad

I feel bad when I'm rushing for the late train

And I feel bad when I'm standing in a crowd

I feel bad when I'm stuck inside my own brain

And I feel bad anytime that I get out

I don't mean to cause you heartache

I'm not trying to make a show

I'm not saying it for its own sake

I just thought you'd like to know that I feel bad

And I feel bad when I'm dancing with my baby

I feel bad when I'm grooving in the street

I feel bad when I'm laying low and lazy

And I feel bad with all the people that I meet

It's just a cockroach in the punch bowl

It's not a plague upon the land

I'm not trying to fill the pothole

I'm just trying to understand

There is a vortex that I dance to

There is a weight I move toward

I track the cyclones on the bayou

Oblivion is my reward

No need to struggle against the quicksand

Or drag my body through the snow

I have a showdown with a dead hand

Before I shuffle down below

All the prisoners in the jails know

Like all the monks in all the world

The politicians and the pimps see

The arc of human history bends towards misery

There's a shooter at the camp-out

There is poison in the well

The turning cartwheels of the impound

As there's a body in the swell

I'm not trying to shake the fault line

Drag the demons up from Hell

I'm no canary in the coalmine

Or the martyr in the cell

So like the runner on the treadmill

Or in a hamster in the maze

The constant hammer at the anvil

The accumulation of the days

This is a vortex I can dance to

This is a mass I move toward

There is a cyclone on the bayou

Another stillbirth in the yard

There is a cockroach in the punch bowl

There is a plague upon the land

I'm not trying to fill the pothole

I'm just trying to understand