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The Shape Of My Life
from If I Could Live Long Enough by Tobin Mueller
Tobin Eyes
Jump to: LyricsLiner NotesIf I Could Live Long Enough album Click here to download the mp3.
Lyrics

What have we made of our lives?
What is the shape of my life?
Have all the edges been torn
Am I old or reborn?
What is the shape of my life?

Who can shape a lifetime?
How many hands have shaped mine?
Whose caress brings life? Whose touch brings death?

When all that I love, slips through my fingers,
Can I shape a future with these hands?

We carve and we scrape,
We smooth and we shape each other. Yes, we shape each other.

And sometimes we cut and we tear to reveal things,
And the scars that grow back have no feelings.
And we seek out pain trying to remain

The same cold crafted likeness,
Someone’s work of art.
Can’t we draft in rightness
Each cell, part by part.
And start,
And start

To live life.
Nothing more, just live life,
Like before my hands turned us to clay, waiting…

I will not let this shape my life,
A life that’s mine to make with my dreams and tears and secret longings…

Can I shape my life, shape my own life, shape one precious life?

©1995, 1998, 2011 Tobin Mueller

Liner Notes

This song is from my Off-Broadway musical Creature and features Woody Mankowski singing the part of Victor Frankenstein, Jeff Cox on acoustic bass and Dane Richeson on drums. It is the second example of a musical soliloquy in the show. "A Promise" occurs early in the show; "The Shape Of My Life" occurs later in the show. Victor Frankenstein is not just a renegade surgeon trying to cheat death, but a gifted sculptor. Thus, his references to hands and artwork apply to both his sculpting flesh as well as clay. As you know from the story, he fails to shape the kind of Creature he intended and feels as if he has failed. This is when the song appears in the story.

I cut one verse in this version, recorded during the 1998 Rain Bather sessions. I loved this recording so much I attached it as a Bonus Track to the 2011 digital release of The Mullers Wheel. But it didn't really fit into that project, so it was dropped when the album was pressed and rereleased in 2012 as Müller's Wheel.

If I Could Live Long Enough

Return to the If I Could Live Long Enough page.

Other lyrics pages from If I Could Live Long Enough

  1. If I Could Live Long Enough
  2. Before There Were Gods
  3. Pilgrim Of The Great Return
  4. Was There Once A Time
  5. Forge A New Life
  6. Falling
  7. Turn It Around
  8. When I Sing
  9. A Promise
  10. The Shape Of My Life
  11. When You Awake
  12. When You Awake reprise
  13. EXCLUSIVE BONUS TRACKS:
  14. You Can't Touch Me
  15. Rock A Baby With Voodoo
  16. Believe
  17. Lucky Boy Blues
  18. Tango
  19. What Is This Touch