From the album a short history of decay
This is a song about being broken down by the middle. The speaker traces a life from innocence through fracture to a kind of numb survival, where beauty and poison mix so completely you can't tell them apart anymore. By the end, even remembering when things were easy is just another way of acknowledging they never will be again.
When I was young / Life was easy / Sweet message sent / Quickly spent
The opening sets up childhood as a brief transmission that burns out fast. That image of a message sent and spent carries the ache of something that arrived already running out.
When I was one / Before it split me / Wrestle with stones / Answered in dust
The shift from young to one marks the exact moment before fracture. Wrestling stones and getting dust back is the first real lesson: you can fight hard and still lose to something that won't even answer properly.
Never come / Never morning / We just let the day / Be what it be
The title phrase arrives broken in half, refusing to complete itself into sense. It reads like giving up dressed as acceptance, letting the day be what it is because fighting it stopped working years ago.
When I was old / Ain't life terrible / With beautiful things / Getting between
The song skips straight from childhood to old, collapsing everything between. Beautiful things getting between makes beauty itself the problem, something that just complicates the clearness of being ruined.
Making love / Face to face / And crooked poetry / With no embrace
Even intimacy arrives damaged here. The separation of making love and no embrace splits connection from contact, leaving the crooked poetry as the only honest thing in the room.
The song ends where it started, back when life was easy, lying quietly. But now that quietness reads different. It is not peace. It is the sound of someone who learned early that the message gets spent fast, and everything after is just waiting for a morning that never comes.