City life

CITY LIFE
By Jack Stafford

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A# Dm D# F
First day in the city and the country boy’s ready to play
It’s a blur of funny flashing faces and he knows he’s gonna stay
Running around with the energy that you only have when you’re young
And he’s smiled at by the older hands too aware of what he’ll become
After all day in the office it’s all night in the bar
And after 10 pints of lager his boss says son your going to go far, would you like a car? He says “Man I love city life”

“I love the hassle of the hustle and the bustle everyday
Survival of the fittest, natural selection that’s the way
Man life is short but days are long and waste is my only dread
Got to live for the moment they’ll be quiet times ahead
I can sleep when I’m dead” Man he loves his city life

10 years on and most have gone but our boy’s hanging in
The work is taking over, it’s a competition he has to win
Spends all his time earning money that he’ll spend on buying back time
But barely has the sense to save for an annual escape
A specialised professional he delegates his life
A nanny for the children, a gardener for the wife, his trouble and strife, Living out his vicarious life.

Among so many yet so few he counts as friends
The more he meets the less he greets and so the spiral descends
He’s moved out of the city and only comes in to trade his stock
Commutes in a compartment to his cubicle in a block
His day is watching numbers on a blindly blinking screen
Then he comes home to another and a night of TV dreams, and a wife that screams “You only love your city life”

Finally the city’s spat him out a humble 65,
Exhausted he just sits at home as a man he doesn’t recognise,
I stopped him in the street one day and I asked him what he’d done
He said “I lived fast and I lived it young and I had a lot of fun
I bought and sold a lot of things, and I stood pretty tall
But if you measure a man by what he leaves behind then it’s hard to tell that I was here at all, “But son I loved a city life”
Man that city life, man that city life, man that city life took it’s toll x2