1. |
Dirt Drawings
02:46
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I was the earth and the soil under your toes.
We worked together pushing against the soles
of your shoes. They were weathered from the load.
A tattered leather holding up the bone.
Well I guess you've got your troubles,
I've got my own.
I was a lightning bug cupped in your hands.
Your skin was ragged, bleeding from the land.
We slowed from greater speeds than were ever meant for man.
I just hope that you'll be able to understand.
I understand.
You were a moment I can't quite explain.
An abstract feeling others thought was strange.
A fleeting sense of orientation and silent pain.
I want to go against the grain,
but I'm not sure if I'm insane
I think I've lost the part of brain that lets you know.
That lets you know.
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2. |
The Shower Song
03:52
|
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Held to down in ink;
swallow away.
I drown it it in the sink
to repay.
Holes in doors
you punched inside my dreams.
But will it bleed?
I guess we'll have to see.
You grind inside my teeth;
charming decay.
I wear the clothes you need
to love me anyway.
Piss me clean.
Mark me, I won't leave.
We fuck and fall asleep.
I kill you in my dreams.
Always.
Remember when
you kissed me on the mouth?
What slipped in,
I'll never let it out.
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3. |
Native
01:16
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You came in with a wicked flash,
left me in a long zombie trance.
I don't think I understand
what you were saying when we put in pants,
it made my head feel real bad.
I don't think I like that.
We conduct our coal,
starve forever
in the general pose.
We spoke in closely interwoven prose.
We conduct our coal,
harsh and clever
in the native man's clothes.
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4. |
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5. |
First Saturday Ives Park
04:08
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Home.
warm in our shame,
tired.
She kissed me,
humming my name,
singing, "I'll try."
But we showered,
filthy and shaking,
terrified.
And we sat there
draining our eyes,
going blind.
I
want to walk to the place
where you cried
and walked me through
the first time
that you tried to die.
And I
grabbed your fingers and
choked them with mine,
and I made you promise to never again.
Well, you promised to never again.
Well, here I am at your hospital bed.
Please just promise to never again.
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6. |
Bathroom Nightlight
05:30
|
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Skin cold, warm for clothes,
but all told you burn the most.
And your car can barely move.
I think it's too far and far too soon.
The bathroom nightlight dimly glows.
You say it's too hot to keep on clothes,
so we'll eat Cheerios out of dirty bowls
while ladybugs keep flying through the screen and out the holes,
and the TV's on.
Your pinky's tendon can't extend.
I feel this as you absentmindedly play with my hands.
The sheets and blankets stick too much
but we lay here as our skins continue heating up.
I take your shape. You grab my sweaty hair.
The broken AC spits out water, forgets we're there.
And as we draw this war we never fought
you roll around to touch my face and say I'm drifting off,
but your eyes won't close.
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7. |
Household Warming Party
02:56
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We research the deepest color.
Faces faded, I will find another.
Tender juices, wine stained sweatshirt.
I'll run through the dark to find a mother.
Chemical investigation.
Swallow serum and question my creation.
Oil painter, paint this friction for me.
Our distractions breathe our blissing,
empty pockets leaking no resistance.
Our mothers dream in ocular gestation.
We invent new tools for aviation.
Hollow dress code, hollow fashion,
hollow industry truths the honest attic.
Wrap in sinew, douse, and hover.
I will love you. I will call you brother.
Patient pacer, poison your insides with light.
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8. |
Alveolus
03:56
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Playing musical chairs with my father's ghost.
I think I know what I'm saying when I say I love you the most.
Climbing up the stairs, up to a fatherly host.
I think I need you for more reasons than you're ready to know.
Oh, I feel so one-sided.
Oh, it's just so hard to see how I'm real.
This serum will make you feel like you're alive,
but you're a spirit.
It's synthetic. It's a lie.
(And we can't breathe when we're hurt,
and we won't speak just to be heard.)
(Would you stay through all this ghosting,
settling for it?)
(I can't discern me from you.
You'd said we'd float right through.)
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9. |
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10. |
"I am."
02:28
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Fell asleep with the lights on again,
and woke to a note that read,
"I couldn't sleep. I need some cigarettes."
I spit blood in the sink again, and wrote out a note that said,
"The dayglo you dreamed in is oozing out my skin.
I've stopped letting people in."
I lied when we fucked again.
She asked, "Are you good? I said, "I am.
I love you, I promise. Now let's just go back to bed."
I dreamed that I died again.
I dreamed I did it with my own hands.
It's not the falling that scares me, it's how desperate I am to land.
I'm afraid of who I am.
She said, "Liam, just go back to sleep.
I'll be here for you if you're here for me."
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11. |
||||
(Postcards from Nova Scotia
Four walls of fog
rubbing
against two sides
of the boat;
the diesel engine
shutdown leaving us,
twenty empty
vessels in one full one,
bobbing blindly in the
Atlantic.
“Try listening,” a voice,
the guide’s
out of
nowhere, says.
Whale listening, then—
we’ve paid
to listen to whales….
Like pyramid
smelling or
symphony seeing,
not a trade wind,
generally,
to tourist
satisfaction. But
make do
we must,
and so lean
into the soupy silence
like figureheads on sinking
expectations.
But all I hear is
the slop
of water
in the bilge,
a furtive potato
chip,
a man farting somewhere
on a fishing boat,
until a child
finally asks,
“What are
we listening for, anyway?
A splash? Some kind
of song?”
“For something large
and genuine,”
that voice again
replies.
“And like anything
large
and genuine,”
it says,
“you’ll
know it when
you don’t
hear it.”
Ah! Like death, then,
and love,
mercy and sacrifice,
too;
like deceit, grace
and denial;
what fathers don’t
say, all that
Basho didn’t write,
the only thing
Beethoven, finally,
could hear. Oh,
Dear Mother,
I think
you told me, though
I never heard,
how many
whales there are in this world.)
(Fishermen wait
Vessels bob
The ocean is, content to
just be as it always has.
as it should
We know this
But what is it to be its
breathing face?
Its cleansing teeth?
That thing we cling to when
we forget that dinosaurs are real?
The feeling of sated
unknowledge that comes;
that holds
The only god we can see,
and so we scramble onto boats,
praying to just maybe be in the
vicinity of
something
we can't believe
The thing that keeps marine
biologists awake as they
drive back through
the dark to their homes
every night,
counting on their fingers,
again,
and again,
and
again.)
(Light
bends and leans against me
Fingers
trace underneath and between my eyes
These contours
we question and create
Our center
we detach and displace)
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