Trickle Down

You cease to smell the steel plant after you've lived here for a while Smoke is snow is ash are leaves that blow through the air aloft And all our houses dim their siding to the same soot grey style And we hang our laundry out on sundays when they turn the furnaces off And everybody's daddy works up on the line The steinbrenners and the wilczewskis have been here the longest time And everybody's mommy squints into the sun Sunday afternoon after all the laundry's done Sometimes a distant siren can set a dog to barking late at night And then it dominos on down 'til every dog is joining in And the first rumors of the lay-offs sang like a distant siren might And we all perked up our ears and paced the fence of the ensuing din And every night we were glued to the tv news at six o'clock 'cause it was hard to tell what was real and what was talk And they explained about the cutbacks all with earnest frowns But what they didn't say was that the plant was slowly shutting down This town is not the kind of place that money people go They make their jokes up on the tv about all the snow And they're building condos down river from where the plant had been But nobody really lives here now that the air is clean And the president assured us that it was all gonna trickle down Like it'd be raining so much money that we'd be sad to see the sun Mr. wilczewski's brother had some business out in denver so they left town Everybody knows they were the lucky ones You cease to smell the steel plant after you've lived here for a while