Wet Concrete

Everything you learn before you're nine goes in wet,

that's the science and the sentence, that's the part you don't forget,

so I flinch at certain volumes and I read a room too fast

and I know exactly why, and knowing doesn't make it pass.

You can't sand it out. You can't pour it out and start again.

The slab is the slab. It set in a house I didn't pick.

But I've watched grown men waste a life

demanding a refund from a building site.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

Set before I had a say.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

Can't undo the shape of it —

so I'm building on the shape of it.

That's the whole of the work.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

And they'll tell you heal it fully, get it back to how it was —

there's no was. There's no factory setting to restore.

There's a person made of everything, including all the worst of it,

and that person's got a hammer and a plot and a permit.

Some of it's foundation. Some of it's just cracks.

Learn which one is which, that's a decade of the work,

and you do it with the professionals, or the patient friends, or both,

and you do it while you're living, 'cause the living doesn't wait.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

Somebody else's boots in it.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

Their prints, my floor —

and I'm still the one who lives here.

That's the whole of the work.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

Nobody's coming back to smooth it over.

Nobody's coming back to say sorry to the slab.

Fine. Fine. Bring the timber.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)

Set before I had a say —

and there's a house on it now,

and the door works, and it's mine,

and the light comes in the front

at about half past four.

Wet concrete. (wet concrete)