Lenderman uses a misspelled idiom to turn vocal fatigue into a metaphor for wild escape that solves nothing. The speaker is stuck near someone whose gun is always drawn, claiming they're doing the best with what they've got, which means they've mistaken survival strategy for contentment and are calling it optimism.
Big flag billow over the trailer park / Where I buried my heart
The flag imagery suggests patriotism or pride, but what's underneath is a burial site. The speaker plants their heart in a specific geographic coordinate of failure and then talks about making do.
My voice is a little horse / Galloping wild through the woods
The song turns 'hoarse' into 'horse' and suddenly the limitation becomes an animal running free. Except the speaker still frames it as a problem, apologizing for something that might actually be the only escape route they have.
Little I learn is so expensive / It almost kills me and purges nothing
The speaker describes lessons that cost everything and teach nothing. This contradicts the earlier claim about doing the best with what you've got. You can't simultaneously be making the most of your situation and learning things that nearly kill you without delivering catharsis.
His gun is always drawn / And his turned back under the whiskey bottle
The gun stays out and the drinking is constant. The speaker describes this like weather, a permanent condition of their landscape. No judgment, no plan to leave, just reporting the facts of someone living next to ongoing danger.
If its not the worst thing it'll do / 'til the worst thing comes along
This is acceptance dressed up as wisdom. The speaker has normalized living in a holding pattern between current bad and future worse. It's the sound of someone who buried their heart and decided that was the same as dealing with it.
The speaker has convinced themselves that waiting for the worst thing while living near drawn guns and empty bottles counts as doing the best with what you've got. The horse galloping through the woods is the only thing in the song that moves, but it's trapped inside a pun about the speaker's damaged voice, which means even the escape fantasy is just another way of describing being stuck.