1. |
Eyelashes
03:29
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All of your debts
That blow to me like harmonizing trumpets
Then fall so ugly on all of me
How much harm will the harmonizing be?
As you take away from me
All of my nets
Where all your silverfish
Used to come right in
I wish you'd let them come again
Not bellied up or smelling of the sin
That you're proudly musking of with
All your regrets
June again
The milk times ten
For I have two new mothers
Giving birth to all the men
My brothers who will molt to others
I'm a thief in the prime of life
A belief that the summer is my knife
A pine tree straighter than a mascara applicator
Bristling and whistling through the needles
Your eyelashes are like needles
How they brown when the sun comes down
And the heat just rises through the needles
Your eyelashes are like needles
Up so tall where a dead phone call
Pumps through the wires, through the needles
Your eyelashes are like needles
Your eyelashes are like
All of your debts
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2. |
Black Holes
05:09
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Though there are so many black holes
The JCPenny and the back of Kohl's
Where rot a lot of things
I can't say
Oh Nicole, your trailer park
Can console any darkness
Spooled around the ground-floor patio
Where the tomatoes
Once cooled in your young night
Don't let it dim your eyesight
Of the divorced split-level mansion
The exit of forced expansion
Now miniatured
The furniture sharpens its imprints
Into the carpeting since
We've dozed off and napped
Is it preserved and plastic-wrapped?
Little Caesars, birthday night
Our dads have seizures and they bite
Their tongues before the rug-burned floor
Where we learned how to die
Where we wrestled, laughed, and tickle-tortured
Till our love made us cry
So Jacqueline, when are you coming home?
Your organ bench is warped and wrenched and so
Many nights I see your bedroom window lights
I guess the widowed ghost ignites
Because they left that house in Union Lake
And I had my First Communion cake
In a weight-room clubhouse of their apartment
Where the freeway air of 275
Rushed when they were still alive
So I extend my endless thanks
Grandchild pranks and oxygen tanks
Hissing to the daytime TV
Where you and me
Crossword puzzles, I was ten
With some promotional pen
And now the doorknobs and windowpanes are
Dripping wet
The dead night is pressing tight against
The glowing light of a heated home tonight
The time machines of television sets
Oh, Mary, let me see that lotto-heart
Let the auto parts break down and die
Wheel around the squealing sound of a
Shopping cart
Smile down the grocery aisle till you
Softly hang your head and start to
Cry
For a while
In Waterford, the discount stores
Sneezing in the freezing rain pours
Sunken women drunken on some far-fetched wrenching dreams
Drenched in Starter jackets of their favorite first-grade teams
Though there are so many black holes
Jacquelines and orphan Nicoles
I know
They all know
Love
All the girls in their smooth teeth
Jot death dates on their loose leaf
I don't know if I'll ever die
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3. |
Thermostat
05:05
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Meet me in the Christmas mall
If this fall I’m swollen
With hot air the heaters blare
Which no one is controlling
And filling up my entire world
And making me feel so young
But old enough to notice that
The thermostat has been stolen
Hey, my best friend
A smile so narrow
Can point like an arrow
To the end of you, and
Oh, how we tend
To pray soft and lowly
For past worlds to slowly
Mend and then
Render tenderly
A brilliantly thawing overpass
The slush shoots out sun like a magnifying
Glass in your eye
Oh my, what it can imply
Makes me cry
You were not so impatient then
Commuter stations of black-night men
God, it makes me think of when
Where was enough without why
Hey, Mary-Lynn
Some moments are frozen
And constantly chosen to win
The grin from within, yeah
Oh, it's always been
So why weep over
Some grade-school sleepover again?
It disintegrates and
The red-faced shame mates with beauty
But in fifteen years
Somerset Mall will be
Just like them all
Summit Place
Dump it all to waste
Is that just what you do when you get bored?
Send a postcard to the Lord
Of the opposite gender
No need to stress, no return address
To fear it may come back to sender
A deer knelt down on the midnight crown of
Someone's front lawn bathed in our headlights
They're white as suns but now we're the ones
Flooding other people's windows with brights
Oh, my little punctured cup
What am I gonna do with you?
Every time I fill you up
There’s something spilling out of you
And filling up my entire world
And making it all so wet
I do believe I can never leave
Every person that
I’ve ever met
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4. |
Birthday Girl
03:02
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Birthday girl
Blue dress
Soft face embrace
In such foreignness
Three birthdays
This spring
Mark this darkness
With some blossoming
The deep world
I knew
It was because
Of you
Although the Volvo is running well
I can smell some
Sorrowful fumes
The blacktop of the IHOP was
Scorched for us
A chorus of buzzing
Street-lamps still looms
Hotel rooms, Oregon
I can't keep up the recording
Of our days, so slick
Bit my nail down to the quick
After the laughter does rise and swell
Like a bell
It falls back to earth
There it is, it perishes
Where it fell
Straight to hell
Now, what is it worth?
But birthday girl
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5. |
Junk-Drawer Sorrow
05:25
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As the windshield wipes and exhaust pipes
Are coughing out some winter
It’s a splinter of what I once contained
And I suppose the whole world glows
A little for the squinter
But you recall when all that fire rained
And nothing very solid
Ever thaws away the squalid
Junk-drawers that us whorish people know
And while the junk collects interminably
Other things will certainly
Thaw away so swollen with the snow
I’ve mythologized the worlds you’re from
The nervous taste of chewing gum
Some high school faces
Basements you protect
But in the spring a cork I’ll find
In the side-yard to remind
The New Year’s souvenirs
I must collect
The sun looks pretty hot today
The snow’s about to rot, they say
So maybe I’ll drive all the way to Lansing
If nothing’s able to stay static
Perhaps we left some strips of fabric
Bloodied up and streaming
In the fencing
And is it possible
That the hospital
Is waiting for all?
Without stall it will bawl all
The life out of you
But nothing is ever lost
The piled past is cataloged and tossed
Into where it is stored in
Some vestigial organ
It pumps inside of me
The bile and the memory
The bathroom tile of ivory
The carpet sponges so absorbently
Nothing is ever lost
Nothing is ever, ever lost
By now I’ve declared you drive a hard bargain
It’s a pardon every time I hear its name
When my tongue’s stung by every dripping juice-hole in the garden
My world goes mute, my cute words dumb and lame
For the dental office arthritics and mental softness heart-critics
Who can’t process me or the sophistry I live in
I will pluck the soft weight of ripe love
The sticky teenage-sweet type of
Respite that the black night bites are given
Where it's probable
I’m unstoppable
By all that tries
To chastise the damp eyes
My world contains?
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6. |
The Black-Ice World
02:46
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Out in the night the world freezes
It pleases me only to know
They say in the wilderness Jesus
Felt his moment slow
I’ve stayed inside for a few nights
Been four or five in a row
Outside the teeth when the frost bites
And pretty girls go
So
Slowly
The world’s frigid harshness
Is clear in the darkness
Your soft skin is clearly unwelcome
Your soft heart is part fear and part dumb
But I love you more than I can stomach
And the world’s love is a frozen phantom
Out in the night the world freezes
It teases me outside to go
Silent and sterile the peace is
And deadly it steadily blows
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7. |
I Buried You So Deep
02:45
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Abigail, I buried you so deep
It's a wonder that they found you
Down by where the pregnant lilacs weep
Well I guess I should have drowned you
But the water was froze up
And your memory rose up
I've made many beds in many towns
Hung like heads 'neath starry crowns
You're the only weight I could wish for
But you don't pin me anymore
And the buoyancy abounds with a pull
Nothing ever drowns full
The water was froze up
Your memory rose up
Abigail, I buried you so deep
I remember when I found you
Down by where the pregnant lilacs weep
I remember when I found you
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8. |
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Papa's standing sort of bovine
In the shrine of his brother's room, the priest
Recently deceased in this North Country heat
Lunch meat on the kitchen counter
Mary's counting bug bites on a sunburned shoulder
I'm counting sacramental rites and old crucifixes
All my great-uncles' nights of cocktail mixes
Are over
Then we encounter
Accidental modern radio hits
Spits his brother's boom-box
From the room walks Papa and then sits
And then it's
Time
Where the handicap tourist-trap putt-putt courses
And trailers patched with corrugated scrap metal and divorces
Stand
Well, I got a granduncle and he lives inland
Where the pure manure summer vapors get fanned
By electric fence whir and a wave of the hand
Of the Amish infants standing barefoot in the sand
While the gas-station kids hang out idle and bland
At the Subway
Well, him and Anne died down in some dim town
Where he built a swimming pool into the swampy farm ground
Where the accumulation of the dimming pounds down
Since the 70s
The pool
Has a cool blue aqua shade
Like the Gatorade that my dad likes to drink
Where you'll peer into the pump-house, dear
Or the diving board where you laid on the brink
But please don't freeze or fade
Like the bottles of booze
That snooze beneath the sink
And if my reasoning gets frayed
It'll cauterize us tauter ties someday
I think
When the roofers jump in the seaway
At midday in their jean-shorts to cool down
We'll go down to Morristown
And bask there in the decay
And ask where our summer glories drown
With the subtle carnage of the bloated rock bass
Sucking in the bright sky summer boat gas
Floating there
As we boated past
Slinking through the stony Thousand Islands
That go sinking in the water with the slickest absence of violence
But
In the musty attic loft
I knew your young sore ecstatic soft
Body
The waitress' language was blaring out, "Can you
Bear the despair of the typos on the menu?"
I wheeled you through the field with the billboards
You wheeled the Ford to the sordid Price Chopper
Where every shopper was leaning in the struggle to stand
Like the green copper-stained gravestones that sink into the land
That night
Earthworms were squirming their way through my dark feel
Some sermons found permanence on ancient-burned reel-to-reel
If permanence is arbitrary
Who decides the summers where we will
Be forever?
I'd like to meet that thing
It's a dimming thing
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9. |
Bike Trail
02:39
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On the bike trail of pale white chalk
Where I surveil the loading dock
That's chipping in the wailing shock
Of the mercilessly electric creatures
The deranged men who shirtlessly stalk
The desperate features in their walk
Until they melt like boiling caulk
On the metal of the blacktop bleachers
The summer has an open hymen
The Sylvan Manor baseball diamond
Rattles hot with tattletales
So frailly shot into the night
Christopher keeps the receipts
For all the love that no one eats
In the glassy office complex suites
Behind which the ditch heats and squiggles
Where all the deathlike little birds
And the yearlings in their little herds
And the perversion of my words
Gets trapped and sweats and frets and wriggles
In a grouping of the tower spines
And the flaccid drooping power lines
Where I'm recouping what is mine
From the placidly eternal
Hot day when the sprinklers vent
A burning rubber aqua scent
And evaporate all that I've meant
About the mercilessly electric creatures
But how do they hone the drone and tune it
To the gargle of the backyard AC unit?
It rattles hot with tattletales
So frailly shot into the night
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10. |
I Met Rebecca
03:27
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I met Rebecca in the summer I forgot my tally
In the back, behind the bowling alley
Where my street
Ends
She opened all the blinds up in my room
She pried open my mouth
And out spilled my gloom
Just as it sometimes
Tends to
We walked up to the point
On Sylvan Lake
It got to the point
That our skin burned and baked
So we dove in
When I met her father
Our clothes were still wet
When I met her sister
Those secrets were not told yet
I wish they'd never been
By 9 p.m., all of them
Carport lights are on
They buzz on through
What does ensue
Till they blend into the dawn
I met Rebecca in some house
In a dream I had
Murderers and worshippers
And random fandom stabbing at us
Till we made an escape
Where she wore some dresses
That to my eyes were gossamer
And the hard truth impresses
That I'd die at the loss of her
So I wrap it up in ribbons and tape
By 9 a.m., all of them
Metal things reflect
The nightmares and the bright sun-glares
That force me to protect
My love
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11. |
Eternity of Dimming
05:26
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August obliterates trust and it's in sun-dust I'm found
Home to swill the shrilly insect sound
Stumble to the Dairy Queen
Thumb a People Magazine
Glossy as the bright leaf greened and drowned
In the light
An eternity of dimming
You turn to me, I'm slimming
The graininess is winning every night
Clarity's a rarity that once was just beginning
Now hellish unembellished foreign blurs
In the corners of my eyesight
In this local exit highway night
We must grow accustomed to the sight
And empty all surprise to see the capsize of the semis
'Cause nothing will stop the world's physics from working
Or the manner in which it's situated and lurking
Permanently, so externally
But there's pleasure and death in each second
To be reckoned with
And there's boredom and sex within each wild minute
And the mildest hour has some deadly power in it
And maybe I'll cower with Yia Yia's silk flowers
As the motion sensor light does brighten and sour
On the back patio where the raccoons go
Whining and divining through the grainy night glow
The same as me as I'm fumbling to see
An inch off my face with a pinch of disgrace
Each photo of the summer is one in the same
With a bloodshot number in the corner of the frame
Dating each time that we became
Memorialized in the
Dimming
An eternity of dimming
You turn to me, I'm slimming
The graininess is winning every night
Clarity's a rarity that once was young and brimming
Now hellish unembellished foreign blurs
In the corners of my eyesight
A bat circles above my brain
As I walk down St. Joseph in the dusky
Graininess, yes this gorgeousness is
Growing too dark
To mention
What becomes of the summer skin
When it disintegrates in
The blackness of the past?
At last, I've become
An extension
Of the dimming
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12. |
If the Suns Collapse
03:42
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My oh my, you're so far away
By the time I see you
The sky may look so evil and gray
Or perhaps, we'll take naps in the sun
If the suns collapse
We'll make laps on the run
And run forever
'Neath their punishment
But punishment is not what you deserve
You were meant
For something they reserve
For early mornings
When your heaven is blurred
Blurred and vague
Each word does age so fast
Like a plague
It's not allowed to last
For very long but how
Fantastic and strong
While it does, while it buzzes free
All that was still courses
Through me
Infinite tons, liquid gallons
Of stunning suns
In some brittle part
Of my little heart
I know I can
Plan a way to stay
And say
My oh my, you're so far away
If I die, it could be today
And all I see
All that I free will be
Okay
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13. |
Nightmares of Space
03:59
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What can it mean to go it alone
To quarantine the moments we've known
And lock it away
And bury the throne
Of a hot summer bed in my heart?
It's not smart
To try to die
When something so soft's standing by
But why should I
Deserve something only to lie?
I don't know why I should
Or whatever let me do it
But if your sweetness
Could defeat this for good
I wouldn't hold you to it
Placing the nightmares of space
Between myself and the dearest face
That I could every try to recall
At all
And if each threat
That we came to regret
As we'd shout it
At the outlet mall
Still dissolves there
Broke and bare
The worst shame
All the same
What can I do but become estranged
From the truest true that the world had arranged
For me to cling to
But only deranged
Sad as a dumpster at night?
It's not right
To kill the chill
That defines the warmth there inside
I'm ill and most likely will
Never get right there inside
But oh the pride
When you were the one who knew me
I cried
When the angels of heat flew through me
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14. |
Surgery
04:39
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I approach my coach to tell him
The anesthesia wore off
And then a loose cough
Crackles accolades in spades
For me
So they pour us up to LaRosa Market
Maybe you meet us with the Taurus
And you park it there
The air is sweet with bare summer feet
And cucumber-scented hair
The sun is wetting heads
Of sweating girls
In pretty smells
It swells and swirls
Then wanes
And the surgical wound
Is twisted deep
Like the sheets on a summer bed
And I'm marooned
In the summer weeds
Behind Sylvan Lanes instead
And all the life behind Sylvan Lanes
It wanes till it is dead
Keego Harbor trailer park
Beneath my parents' Upper Room
They had one too
Pet love in the sweat of
Forgetful heavenly days
I got some Mackinac Island caricatures
Where my toothy youth decays
When we would take Orchard Lake Road
To the St. Mary's Fair
Your first cellular phone
And the tone of the blown-out speaker
Lying supine on the pebbly asphalt
Electrically whine through the trebly assault
As the sidewalk calk, yeah the fault-lines
Scuff your sneaker
Disposable camera prints
Leaning in the doorjamb squints
The figure of my dad
And the body he had
When he was shirtless and virile
He'd drive me to intramural
Or the soccer travel fear
A Chevy Cavalier
And though I was puerile
My comfort was near
I genuflect on the kindergarten rug
Where I chugged all my pure light
A clunky TV cart and the sunken eyesight
A sleepy-eyed departure of a dream
Now I'm feeling like a phony up at Kerby's Koney Island
And the parents tick in decades
And the pathos just parades its wickedness
So sad
All the love that we had
Dissolves to an abyss
Of summer ski-hills
Where my newcomer skills
Once skidded in wintriness
Till the kid crashed
And red-faced shame
Is the world's only aim
When my spoiled Christmas gifts got stashed
I could hear strange percussion
In the depths of the concussion
Like the fireworks that once splashed
In Sylvan Lake
Then some pungent summer deodorant
Forced me to awake
To my mother's laugh
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15. |
If the Summer
04:42
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Oh, if the summer
Leafy screens
Of the undersides of bushes
Took me in like time machines
I'd crawl out
Red-faced
2006
And set my mind to find you
Inside the library bricks
And with your date-stamper
You'd brand my hand
I'm the nervous camper
Who would happily choke on the woodsmoke
To lie next to you where you woke
In the sand
Oh, what a bummer
Not to re-begin
Not to have a sunburn
Marrying the sum of our skin
And in some very small rooms
Where we'd sweat through the sheets
I'd curse the hour that it all blooms
And just pray to God it repeats
M.A.C. and Elizabeth
Sweating through the
Sheets with
A memory and a myth
The balcony of Meredith's
Apartment
Blinded my eye sockets to the
Sight of Marian
The youngest memories burst
Like a sun
In the hot black night I
Found my contrarian
If any girl is cursed
She's the one
And I am the curse
I am the worst
Oh, if the summer
Lake and pool
Cease to make my body
Feel so young and cool
For I've been burned so badly
In the worst way
By squandering so sadly
By being cruel
In that way
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16. |
||||
I'll be swimming in the ditches
With the brimming snowmelt
With unexplainable fishes
And the plopped-down mallards belt out
For vouchers of pizza coupons
Surrounding the mailbox
And drowned in the lawns
There with me
Yes, some spiny heart grieves
For our occasional escape
In its artichoke leaves
That our bottom teeth familially scrape
Then discard on creased paper plates
As a knife extricates what's released
And the heat levitates
Does your dad fall asleep
With the remote in his hand?
Does a digital beep
Promote gentle reprimand
To share all your love
Like the threadbare cloth of
Some T-shirt your mom wears
From a tournament of soccer you played
In 1998?
He bakes blank birthday cakes
In the grocery store flicker
And the hard plastic cases
He seals with a sticker
With a bar code and what's owed
And in a gossiping snicker
The birthday-boy moms
With expired pom-poms gravitate
To personalize one
For her first and only prized son
I cannot sleep
With this language snowing so deeply
In my head
Dim soccer goals
And non-marking gym soles
With which I walk through instead
The archaic layout of the buildings that play out
My past as I'm lying in my bed
They will not stay out and so the only way out
Is to worship these worlds with my face red
Blushing beauteously
Rushing circuitously
Shaking with every endorphin
Constantly mesmerized
By all I've memorized
Leaving no place as an orphan
I perfect my conveyance by directing a seance
From an eighth grade computer lab station in the basement
Where the latchkey kids feel like a non-factor
And the black-ice skids call the strip-mall
Chiropractor
To the sweetly faulty parents
On their white-stained salty errands
Nonetheless, I digress
I walk through
Each janitor's closet
And lavatory faucet
And desk configuration
And signature validation
On a permission slip nervously forged
Clarifying tenuous eras of my penmanship's formation
The holy gradation
For the coaches that wronged me
And my sense of belonging
There's a song I can taste when the braces are tightened
And the forceps clamp and the summer is heightened
And my mouth is the amplifier that voices its name
Well, no two-bit piece of shit interloper
Is gonna touch my world or molest my hope or
My kingdom that lingers in each drawer I open
When I open it up I'll be groping at what is for damn sure
In the dimming of Sylvan Manor
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17. |
Dealerships
05:00
|
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The muffler smoke
Does lovingly choke
The community college's dusk parking lot
The potholes soak
Because the ice broke
And jarringly jolt us till the shocks are shot
And the carports are revving with warming-up motors
With throats that are heavily fuming exhaust
And I taste who I am when I breathe the odors
And all that was feral is sterile with frost
And it feels so good
Feels so holy
My world should
Soon control me
And I know that I would
Like it to
The shrink-wrapped cosmetics and cardboard aesthetics of department store picture frame inserts that my
Mother keeps under a sink in a cupboard with her high school diploma and it hurts to try
To keep all our treasures intact for forever in fact they are cluttered and muttering sighs
The pipes froze and ruptured and so now her cupboard is full of possessions that she can't keep dry
I see wild geese in the drainage ditch east
Of the hotel chains behind Thunderbird Lanes
When I go do some banking, rigidly thanking
What the frigidness deems and the extremes it contains
And the funeral home, pharmacy, bar and grill are to see
Me to the white and bright sports domes of youth
But all that was docile's now frozen and hostilely
Clenching her denture where once was a tooth
Behind the Home Depot parking lot
The cold woods decay
The homeless they go and squat
And wrestle their way
The old lovers spurn
And the new lovers enter
The bitter night burns
In the bottle return's sticky center
Where
The dealerships garishly light up the parish where we
Wore Catholic uniforms from K to 8
The winter it frigidly deals out a litany
Of auto parts from car wrecks at the Secretary of State
Dealerships, dealerships in the night townships
Where my allergist's magazines were from the late
1990s when dealerships dealt out
Pleated-pant children belting in lots
Shelter their snow-boots in sweltering showrooms
Or a storage space that radiates ten-thousand watts
And then
I'll meet you out where the outlet malls turn to black holes
I'll greet you cradling obsolete remote controls
To television sets in entertainment cabinets
From lost living rooms of trampled carpets
Of VHS sun-bleached cassettes and teenage trophies of plastic soccer nets
And the clip art signs are cartoonish on diners
Which are actually grimmer than hell in the night
And a bright CVS might make me obsess
But at least I have found what is mine in the light
And it feels so pure
Feels so singular
Still and sure
That's the thing you were
Meant to see when you
Went through the
Dimming world
Those blaring bugs wouldn't leave me alone
And it's not that I deserved their letting
The autumn tugs and the summer moans
And pretty soon winter was setting
And if safety is the one thing
I knew never would harm me
Last hot fall
I put all mine
In a Salvation Army
On the borderline of losing my mind
And pitifully making excuses
On the borderline of sweetness I find
In Rhode Island and Massachusetts
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18. |
Funeral Family Flowers
01:26
|
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The trees of memories don’t shift
Though their shadows deep and dark orbit
Around the years
Here
Where careers
Are shaped like houses
The stars are dead
But their tombstones love me
Their funeral family flowers flicker and shine
So bright above me
|
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19. |
Open It Up
07:51
|
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Hard-hopin'
I can open
It up
Heartbroken
And soft-spoken
Ain't we all grown up now?
Mary-Lynn, when you call to me
There is little I can do
And you want to bring it all to me
Well, you know, I'd want you to
But seeing as there is no place
Seeing as there is no trace
I do not know if I can taste it
Anymore
Now I rub each tear duct with my hands
When someone's foreign bathtub product brands
Stung my heart and plucked my glands
Because it understands the smell
You wore
That's when I follow my dad down
To the video rental store
Mentally explore
The glorious
Phantasmagoria
To some sunny summer family reunion in a soccer practice park
Through a dark grainy camcorder
With '1994' in white numbers on the border of the lower right corner where you
Were quite pixelated by the men in the tans
Beside the subtly outdated minivans
In turquoise polos as the boys blow 'O's
Through the dirty mustaches they grew
Smoking Merit cigarettes you inherit from Papou
Pulled from soft packs in an '89 Buick Park Avenue
In slacks on the pickup lane of the Catholic K thru 8 his great grandson goes to
There's a dead world locked in a Nintendo 64
In some divorced friend's mom's apartment bedroom drawer
And a chandelier of chrome in her white brick apartment home's
Shared stairwell where the farewells blew
And sag with the bags
Of sidewalk salt
You cannot disown
Your middle-school cologne
And the tedium
Is the medium that connects
All that is holy
I was the goalie
Who let in an infinitude of
Worlds
That I can't possibly disown
The snow
Ossified to bone
And got stained so black
By the track of the sliding doors
Of the modern cell phone stores
Chaldeans smoking sweetly
As the deeply dim night pours
For you
There's a meteorologist
On the local news
Whose hand I got to grip
On a fifth grade field trip
He's no long young-dad hip
For he's now as old as all of us
Would ever want to be
And the weather, we foresee
Will be better endlessly
Once Nana's
Backyard swallows us
The lawns aren't cut too short
And they abut the tennis court
And our ages are not cages
That we cannot re-assort
Oh, the obsolescence
Of your adolescence
Heavy as a copy machine
Gargantuan, elephantine
In an old friend's dad's 90s home office
With off-white purring processors
And PC blurs on monitors
They can't display the past so they
Just mark their time and darken
I'm just
Hard-hopin'
I can open
It up
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20. |
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There's a white limousine with Massachusetts plates
And on the loose its occupants, those 90s prom dates
Careen
I tongue at my molar, you're my only consoler
You're my midnight buyer in the back of the Meijer
Yeah
My world's a comprehensive private diorama
Unpunctuated by any comma
You got
I was a queer balladeer, so proud of our new minivan
You know your dad gave all he had, he does his best for you just when he can
Greenfield Village and a field trip version
Of young faces on every person
I knew
Now all the modern dilettantes, they typed out their privileged isms
In their moronic fonts and hyped-out syllogisms
With some get-well cards from my date-stamp aunt
Yeah, I'd frame all that minor fame, but I just can't
When my best friend Doug's brother had some flashy two-seater
All the sleepover soda when we explode a splashy two-liter
The stoplights are cherry red, or very greenish blue
Like the mushy color of the 7-11 slushy hue
And the liquid wicked warping
Of an ambling ambulance's distancing pitch
I hooked my thumb through your belt loop from which I hitched to every twitch
You made
What we found stashed in the trashed-out woods behind the Taco Bell
Is why I identify early sex with the oily smell
Of WD-40 and a blindness to the ways
Of the kindness behind us and the lukewarm heat lamp buffets
Now we report all our pathos to the food court police
Where the pity and the loss grow so shitty and obese
And sad
But in Baker's frozen woodlot
With the smiling sniffling good snot
You tried to wipe away but you could not
When the sun's explosion
And slow plummet
Can look so frozen
As we glow from it
All our disastrous love, it goes by many titles
It froze inside the snows where I'd dropped it with its broken vitals
But I remember your sorrow outside of Espresso
With all you wanted to borrow, and all I said was "I guess so"
And I wish I had
Just granted you that
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Frontier Ruckus Detroit, Michigan
Michigan band inviting you to enter a dense & dimming world.
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