[Verse 1] Cowboys in a spaceship The crowd noise is wasted Women take pics so they can seem naked Guys tell jokes so they can see ‘em naked Church ladies vote what they perceive sacred Proposition hatred Phosphorous in riverbeds Billion dollars spilled to fill esophagus with cigarettes Philosophers plot to maul Nations out of shock and awe Generation of ideas Children who won’t talk at all Profits fall Chalk on walls Years spent on prison cells Next to die Living hell His twelve peers didn’t exercise their privilege well Babies raised through the glass Bullets at the border war games take a stab Coordinate who can pass like a paper bag Minutes on an internet pornpage fornicate make her gag What’s the damage for the neighbor tagged by the amateur? Water blast erase the trace of the canisters Waterpath took the stairways left the banister Washed over premises turned up percentages Lost under sludge lots of revised sentences Defense budgets padded by sandbags and sandwiches
[Chorus] Wasted Drag this baggage Hold this Damage Cope the best that we can manage Want solutions Needs new standards Cry our beauty from the ashes
[Verse 2] To do list throw away mail go buy envelopes Who’s this coulda-been-Rhodes’-Scholar-centerfold Every day’s a resource to be sure Its integral to rebirth from t-shirts to minerals The ward’s filthy Search for another light in town Nobody else home Can’t carry their same load But I feel guilty like the flight went down And my cell phone wasn’t on airplane mode Soy-based newsprint Blackmarket foodstamps Poison in the Pete moss Suffocated beatbox B-boys in detox Corrugated cardboard Lockheed lobbyists floor debating star wars Yeast and fungi Springtails ants and nematodes Sawdust yellowcake Organics decompose Bokashi EM-inoculated wheat bran Toxic compounds broken down under coffee ground Ancient carcasses in the sphagnum lost and found Empty cartridges from a magnum Tossed into agricultural lime rockflour and seaweed meal Bioremediate man-made molecules
Wasted
[Verse 3] Ashes to eggshells Woodchips to whiskers Anything we can mess up we can fix up Sword to plowshare Soiled from beneath the trash Detroit red into El-Hajj Malik Shabazz Oildrum to steelpan Prisoner to Gramsci Rose from the concrete Reverse the flows of the Ponzi schemes Cripwalk to a conscious beat Hip-hop is a compost heap Gangsters to gardeners Rivals into partners Fanatics to reformers Felons into farmers Inmates to fathers of innercity scholars Poptart to salad Teens into college Lawns into restaurants Centerfold models to artists Police abuse to catharsis Street sergeants into peace departments Thousand dollar bills to green for all markets Backlots to blacktops and cashcrops for have nots Metal into scrap shops Jobs for the cast-offs Crackspots into earthships for urban astronauts Reservation into reservoir Of wisdom we used to know Use the whole animal Landfill to future home Pacifist guerrillas to bazooka zones Black hawks to attics C-130′s to superdome Newborns on computerphones So the smile’s not wasted