Pleasure Palace

For you, it must be terrible to age.
For me, it's just the same old cage;
The bars a little rustier, the air a little mustier.
But it's home. Prison's new for you.

While your pleasure palace falls into decay,
My little hovel's rather nicer painted gray.
I'd never claim I won the beauty race; I didn't even place.
But I can't lose what I never knew.

Whereas you, when in your glory, conquered all of us.
You were the undisputed queen to anyone who'd ever seen you.
I really love to tell the story of how you kissed me on a city bus,
Feeling tipsy and magnanimous.
I will always remember that kiss,
And all the witnesses to the miracle of your lips on mine.
They saw my brush with the divine.

You'd be as beautiful as ever to the likes of me,
If it weren't for the injections and the surgery.
You could have been a lovely ruin, but you said nothin' doin',
You're gonna fight time as long as you live.

You always looked your best for me in morning light,
Unpainted, unadorned, clutching your coffee tight.
Now you won't let me see your face before an hour's wait outside your door,
And I fume, but I always forgive--
Forgive whoever it is who emerges, whoever it is you are now.

Because you lived in beauty once. It's a place I wouldn't know,
But even from out here I can see what agony it would be
To feel that failing, to have to let that go.