put all my cards out on the table, put all my secrets in a firework and lit them up and watched it burn, hoping to impress you with the pretty lights.
always believed those layers would keep on peeling back, but it seems that i'm raw now, glued to the floor now and begging for more than you're willing to give.
i wasn't enough to stand out from the flock, guess i would have been just another cock, and here i was expecting you to come knocking at my door.
i was never good at playing it cool, i always seem to break every single rule, but for the first time in my simple life, i'm feeling like a kind of ordinary guy.
i used to laugh at the barbie dolls, who'd braid their hair so the boys would shout.
i told myself i wasn't missing out, so it's okay to keep pigging out.
and then the closet came out in the sun and suddenly you're everything you swore you'd never become; tied on a leash to your fantasies, i've watched the sun rise from the wrong side too many times.
but just trying to make you see me is like trying to run on vaseline.
i just flail around and from the ground you seem about a thousand feet high.
i'm not that good at being a man, but i'm doing the best i can.
i try not to lie and i try not to cry, but still i make a kind of ordinary guy.
so step right up and come on and get your piece of grade-a carved up kind of ordinary.
step right up and get your own little piece of sliced up kind of ordinary.
from red socks and that wishing chair, ivory keys and the harbour fair; bananas at christmas and mittens for june, kicking that ball up in my room; to tacky shirts and brand new hair, clinging to that wishing chair as it takes me in the sky, dragging the weight of some ordinary guy.


Lyrics submitted by playedinstereo

an ordinary kind of guy song meanings
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