Dave Keats songs are © copyright protected.

Venezuela

I flew West to Venezuela
Didn't have a reason but who needs one anyway when there's nothing better to do?
Life in my hometown always seemed the same.
Wintertime looked as though it was gonna stick around for ever more.

In squalor, in Venezuela
Spent his whole life working for a dollar a day selling brushes.
On the same street corner that he calls his own.
When the working day's over and the punters have gone back to the city.

He got wed, in Venezuela
To Waneeda who he'd courted since way back when in the barrios.
She was a street-wise kid who wore a patch on her eye,
An inheritance she'd gained from a trick that she'd turned on a sailor.

Is that a light in the tunnel or a star in the sky?
It's so distant, it's too hard to see.
Is there no way up from a bottomless pit?
Or are the birds the only ones to get free?
There's a cross on the temple, there's a log on the fire,
Chained like fishes are chained to the sea.
Oh oh can't anyone hear? Oh oh oh.
Where you gonna go? Oh oh oh.
It's not what but who you know.

He got drunk in, Venezuela.
In a town with no future. Didn't even have a past that he could call his own.
He stared at the starkness of the plain stone walls,
It was either that or go back to the solitude of Waneeda.

He once left her, in Venezuela,
Looking for a life that was nowhere to be found by a man like him.
All he ever wanted was a job on the farm.
Food on the table, like people who he didn't even know by name.