Just a lot of things to do

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen's new album Old Ideas. An early stanza from the song 'The Darkness' stands out with its plain-speaking directness & economy, and marvellously effective internal rhymes in lines 3 & 5. There is a Buddhist stripping away in this stanza & the song, and it reminds me of something Cohen said in an interview in 2005 about his time in a monastery ... "there you get so tired that you can’t pretend, and that’s all that a monastery is. They make you so tired that you give up pretending."

I got no future
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too.