1. |
Hello Nurse
03:03
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ll the things we packed but forgot the landing gear. All the close calls we made long distance and collect. A horizon of cell towers that are stitching up the sky. Old historic malls, fallen aircraft, bounced checks. Home. Crashed home. All the Rip Van Winkles that I call my closest friends. I wasted all my twenties forging suicide notes. Then my eyesight went and my liver and my pride. I woke up almost forty, with a family, with a life. Home. Crashed home. Crashed home. Crashed.
All the brand new bloods and the schemers and believers and the glowers and cold showers and destroyers and redeemers and the weekends and the months and the yearnings and the hurt. We’re stripping off the bandages to hear the ambulances sing. Home.
Crashed home. Crashed home. Crashed.
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2. |
Crashed Home
01:42
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Pack up the ice packs and bruises. A weekend of ghost walks, transfusions. The body’s telegraph is tapped out. Tangled miles of wires and confusions. Sift through our dust for carbon dating. My half-life’s three-quarters past and fading. We are so much meat and marrow squeezed into life spans too narrow.
Put another zero on the expiration date and hibernate for years but the coma won’t take. We thread the centuries with a ribbon of rust and all the boring books that historians trust. Give this sad parade
a name. It cringes and it fevers and faints. End it in a bed and wait. Forgotten by the sinners and saints.
Clean up the spit up. Tune up the hearse. Bankrupt the blood bank. Send in the nurse.
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3. |
Punchlist
05:06
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We formed a hunting party and brought down the buffalo with our grandfather’s Ithaca gun in the city of a thousand committees. So I made a punch list and I put us on it. I made my life an island, just to kick you off it.
The factories behind my house still kiss the earth with their polluted mouths. So babe, put on your theater blues. We got so much digging and burying to do. Right?
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4. |
Daycrawlers
03:27
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Then we found the cure and the cure nearly killed us. It made us a nation of anxious analogue addicts. There are watts in the blood and the young dads get restless, tracing old shadows we stained on the ground. So we took these great trips but we tripped once too much. Stumbled and staggered and then we crashed home. Debased in the basement, mainlining the signals.
Red, white, black and blue wires. String us up to be strung out.
I follow you night and day with my spotlight and microphone recording the sounds of you breaking dishes in the house. Late at night when you escape to make your mayhem in the yard. We’re trailing these wires wherever we go.
Red, white, black and blue wires. String us up to be strung out.
The years are neatly stacking up against us. The hair is creeping off my head. Old friends are looking thicker. The mailman says this is my last address. We’ll tattoo all the lost blueprints and schematics across our chests. Our kids are polishing the muskets while we drag this equipment across the yard.
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5. |
Seizure Party
04:42
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Our paper streets are shovel-ready. Bed sheets stamped with warm bodies. But I’m down in the basement huddled around ham radios. Unraveling the language that grows between the static cracks. Finding new frequencies in the semaphore of sick bodies.
Last week’s seizure party made off with the silver. They lay down in the hallway and they shook and pilfered. Throw down your anchor, throw down your anchor, root yourself to the city, all its cruelties and cankers. Wake up from a five-year fit and find your fevers right where you left them.
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6. |
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Plant yourself in the garden state and stay stranded until middle age. The greener grass gives you grayer hair. The coast it crumbles and leaves you there. Another speck on the ocean shelf. Life preservers in spite of ourselves. All the erosion shrinks the world to size. Shuck off our fates and dry out with the tide. Spike your feet to the desert sand. And stand here shaking until you shake off the land. Another world without stop. Without stop. Without.
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7. |
Paperbark Boston
03:09
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Help me commit this graffiti to memory.
The places we went are now the places we were. All the straight-edge kids are getting stoned in the kitchen. But I’m still not sorry about your garage.
Maybe if we peel the bark off the banister we’ll find the house buried inside the house.
Maybe if we peel the bark off the banister we’ll find the house buried inside the house. Have you seen us on the backs of the milk cartons? Are we aging into more and more of ourselves?
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8. |
Service Animal
02:03
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The smoke signals are overhead. The plague years, they never end. So I go to movies alone. My neighbors are on the roof. My lawyers are burning the proof. People are making pyres. They’re in the street. I’m in my chair.
Letting the dark do all the work. These lessons in small variances.
Show me how the motor stalls. Show me how the needle falls. Show me when the shaking stops. Show me how to contract the heart. Show me how the living don’t depart. Show me where the nurses are.
Send the smoke so low.
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9. |
Jesuser
01:37
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10. |
Tolls
05:35
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fter the crash we kept our new beds in the dirt. Warmed by the germs and the curses we dragged back to earth. All our old loves are still stranded in this quarantine. They roll their eyes and they sigh and no longer catch what we mean.
The equipment is broken and doubt outlasted our rage. Replaced by the kids who still believe in their age. Our houses grew quiet and we learned to adore all the rust. Live like civilians who tell the same stories at dusk. Dementia has washed out all those young foolish fears. Now I fall asleep singing along to the ringing in my ears...so long.
Because the tolls come so often. Because the tolls are too high. Because the tolls don’t soften. Because the tolls are the price. Because the tolls will break you. Because the tolls are all nigh. Because the tolls get louder, as we get older. Because the tolls pass you by.
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Jetsam-Flotsam Cary, Illinois
A family-owned, independent record label specializing in all kinds of punk-rock music
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