Creation gave us instincts for a purpose. Without them we wouldn’t be complete human beings Yet these instincts, so necessary for our existence, often far exceed their proper functions. We drank to drown the fear inside We drank to swallow all our pride To silence guilt and feed the flame Then drank again to play the game We dreamed of power, dreamed of gold Poured ourselves a lie to hold We had an alibi for every glass An excuse we thought would pass Times were hard, or times were good We drank the way we always would We never thought to change our lives Just change the shape of our disguise Too much love or none at all A rising star or a tragic fall We won the war, we lost the peace We found a drink for each of these At home, at work, in victory The bottle held the only key We thought conditions drove us here That if the world would become clear But every time we almost found The perfect world, the solid ground The conditions never quite came right So we kept pouring through the night It was us who had to bend Meet the conditions, or never mend We had an alibi for every glass An excuse we thought would pass Times were hard, or times were good We drank the way we always would We never thought to change our lives Just change the shape of our disguise It never once occurred to us The one thing we could change… was us The one thing we could change… was us
