1. |
The Splendid World
02:58
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This year's robin's breast is not as red
The entire nest is underfed
Every bed I've made has broken down
The AA meeting is letting out
From the parking lot where my mother let me try out
Driving my grandfather's car when I was just fourteen
If the splendid world wants to end and rid us
I wish it'd just get on with it and forbid us
I can't keep track of what I own
My brightest day was poisonous but agile
And then you decay in a way so fragile
In the sticky shade with an ice cream cone
Whatever happened to the little sailboat
We kept behind the shed but only once made float?
I used to climb upon it onto the roof
And now the earwigs climb the trashcan
I figure I'll become a sort of watery man
Pissing in my night backyard
Distributing the proof
You can keep a record of all your meals
And the way that each day feels
Safe and well-preserved in some hidden cavity
But all your private and precious locales
All your hidden heavens and all your pals
Are gonna succumb to the brutal gravity
Baby I know
The splendid world is immune to flattery
It burst me on the sidewalk like a run-over battery
All my metallic innards come pooling out
To try to name this is to be less famous
If I were dumber and detestable I'd be more successful
But on the sharp scorched grass there's nothing else to sing about
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2. |
Bathroom Stall Hypnosis
04:13
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How does one little girl
Manufacture so much gall?
Your little body's swelling with it all
You're gonna need a bigger room
You're gonna need some strong perfume
To keep those boys interested enough to call
Being young is no excuse, friend
When you're old enough to flush that loose end
After you cut those lines in the bathroom stall
Is your microphone malfunctioning?
Or is it finally broken?
Mine's so loud it's ringing in your wall
So when you look at a photo of us in our prime
How do you not fall apart each time
You think of me?
Or do you not think of me
Very readily?
Bathroom stall hypnosis, doll
Kicks in when that latch closes
Although I'm told the snow gets cold
Through disillusioned noses
And when no one's bearing witness
Will you still be the princess
Of the bathroom stall?
That's all I wanna know
How does one little girl
Pull the wool constantly?
The dry cleaners ain't 24-hours, you see
It's ok to take a break
It's ok not to fake
To be that girl I thought I knew you to be
You tricked that kid in the bar smoke
Into thinking he was in on our joke
Well, he don't know the pattern
Now, does he?
Vitriol is poison
I'm just trying to get some noise in
Before you turn the power out on me
So when you think of our feet in the sweet hurried flight
How do you fall asleep each night
You think of me?
Or do you not think of me
Voluntarily?
Bathroom stall hypnosis, doll
Kicks in when that latch closes
Although I'm told the snow gets cold
Through disillusioned noses
And when no one's bearing witness
Will you beg for forgiveness
In the bathroom stall?
That's all I wanna know
How does one little girl?
Don't call me from bathroom stalls when
The heavy nightmare falls in
I can't help you now, I'm quite afraid
Well, I know that nightmare
Yeah, I've been living there
Since some little girl
How does one little girl
Make me feel so goddamn
Betrayed?
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3. |
Sad Modernity
03:31
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Summer, 2007
Drunk at the wedding
Of my former enemy
Those days
I was still stuck in my young ways
Back when the fresh-faced girls
Were still a friend to me
The theme song
To this sitcom
Don't have shit on
Our greatest episode
I still think back to
All that shrink-wrap you
Placed around your heart
As it overflowed
But who knows where we are?
Now that my first car
Houses nothing but the stuffing
Of the pain of mundane joyful suffering
Sad modernity
Had its turn with me
Baby, did it have its turn with you?
You moved out to Seattle
You won the raffle
At work for the waterpark
You drove me across
The country black with loss
But something in the dark
Well, we made it spark
But who knows where we are?
Now that my first car
Spun itself into the median
On I-75 this evening
Sad modernity
Had its turn with me
Baby, did it have its turn with you?
My mom's there
Selling menswear
In the lens flare
Of some little memory
Summer, 2027
Drunk at the wedding
Of my newest enemy
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4. |
Very Well
05:01
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Burning smell of black-dyed hair
Bathroom bit by winter air
You shit-talk your old lovers
What's left 'neath your cold covers?
Your father's shaky tacit holds
Ankles strangled in the folds
The fitted sheet at the feet of spring
Come see me when you can't sing
Any longer as things go
Mouth all full of filthy snow
And you wouldn't know
But I still can't believe
And that smell
The burning hell
Of the tress
And what can I tell
You but yes?
And very well
I wake up to a joke so deep
Laugh myself right back to sleep
Walk along the thawing shore
That's pawing at my young drugstore
Where last I saw your baby teeth
Glinting as I fell beneath
And you wouldn't know
But I still can't believe
And that smell
The stinging swell
Of the day
Has shown me the way
And what can I say
But very well?
And you wouldn't know
But I still can't believe
About that smell
The way it fell
Indelibly spry
And how am I?
Can't you tell?
I'm very well
I'm very well
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5. |
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You say that you've forgotten
But I know that you're rotten in your sweet little way
Like the crabapples
Themselves like ornaments
Fermented in the suspense
Of their sweet decay
Drinking Shell station wine beneath the Sylvan Lake willow
My prophesied Rebecca on my bike trail and pillow
I still see your cheeks so red in Pontiac summer
The pulverized sidewalk and the racing and the stupor
Or in danger, and the kids using a milk jug for a basketball
I'd risk it all to ask it all, to bask the fall again in splendor
Tracing your rotten spine
Oh, but when you hair was still long
Everything a new song and the heater and the theater
Soiled tights and the nights
Where we touched in standing darkness
The odor was magnetic and we wore it like a harness
My memory is freezing in your dead night winter attic
Evacuated all except for the electric static
Of our bodies sparking on the carpet and the mattress
Something made a tar pit out of what was once a fortress
Who can really say?
Maybe I took that for granted
But somehow my lips never left
Where the back of your neck slanted
Oh, my little wastrel
My sweet lost friend
My piss is in the tendrils
Of your rented house ivy
That ensnares the end
Suspended there
Like the crabapples
Themselves like ornaments
That's what you said one morning
Looking out the back window of my parents'
Weren't some mornings so fine?
There inside that book I gave you
Maybe there's a line you wrote to remind you or to save you
Pretty "bois" sell shitty ploys
But mark down all they're telling
Catchphrases that vaporize
Within ironic spelling
But now the crabapples are in the century's storm
The World Series is over
And the world's collapsing in its form
I think of all those young names that day on the stones we read
Then cold Arizona Iced Tea when the cemetery scorched us red
Now I am blind to your weekends
The snorting kind of your new friends
But there's a lot where Washtenaw ends that you might recall
I know the way your body bends
In the parked van where still impends
The smoking frozen moment and
The cataclysm of it all
And I know your girlhood diary pens
I read it back to you with tenderness
Inside that summer bed
Across your mother's hall
Did I die inside the cleanse
Of blinding-sun Lake Huron lens
Where we were perfect?—that depends
It's all just sand and squall
Do you still hum when night descends?
I thought it was your calmness then
But it's your motor panicking
With the animals trapped in your wall
All the boys that you fucked over
Eventually got out of Ann Arbor
Honey, how come you're still stuck behind
The counter?
The streets we used to take
The cracking of the lake
I'll never get that final point you were barely even trying to make
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6. |
Darling Anonymity
04:54
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I no longer know your name
But I can't forget every single time you came around
Every time you came around for me
You came down on me so hard
I will never be the same
April spits a frigid flame
Of boiling memory
The neighborhood for me
Is black and perfuming
Lilacs fracturing in the yard
Now you don't mean shit to me
It isn't how it should be
Darling
But I didn't refuse you
No, I didn't choose to
Stick my nose in every single opening that's powdering
But the place where the ice glare
Tasted the sharp air
Of the open water on the lake
As it breaks
Oh the spring night
Oh the sting might wake me up to see
Your initials on the sacrificial version
Of me
Darling anonymity
You're planning alarming schemes
It's startling when you teethe on the cartilage
Of my ear and knee
What's the last thing that you said?
Will somebody find you dead
Inside my TV screen?
Grassier and green
The smell of gasoline
The summer's perfume keen
And so dense
I am always panting for
The smell decanting on your floor
The kidney and the spleen
The bladder filtered clean
The purity I mean
The prettiness
The preen
You, in a sense
Now you don't mean shit to me
It isn't how it should be
Darling
But I didn't refuse you
No, I didn't choose to
Stick my nose in every single opening that's blossoming
But that place where the ice glare
Tasted the sharp air
Of the open water on the lake
As it breaks
Oh the spring night
Oh the sting might wake me up to see
Your initials on the sacrificial version
Of me
Darling anonymity
You're planning alarming schemes
It's startling when you teethe on the cartilage
Of my ear and knee
It's harming the summer's I have left
It's squirming
It's making such a mess
My heart is at the broken Dairy Queen
Where our kiss is melting with the rest
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7. |
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Down in the morning we thought we'd never lose
I saw everything
It startled me
I briefly knew what you were gonna do
I sprinted that night all the way to the bar
'Cause I smelled danger all around our little star
The galaxy
Was blacker than the one I thought we knew
At the jukebox I stared across
At the display
You were putting on
I thought I'd gone to hell that day
Who were you when you were laughing
In that horrid way?
Next to him
What made it dim, our special day?
When we were
Down in the morning we thought we'd never lose
Drowned in your fried eggs
Half-asleep
I'd sweep the glory of your unshaved legs
I wonder where the moments go when they die?
The quotient's too imbalanced to ever truly fly
And that is why
They eventually just settle down to dregs
But on that day
The squirrel dragged its way across
The bike trail where we did fail
To save its loss
Maimed and lame is what we became
In the coin toss
All the same, nobody came
To claim the dross
It's piling
Down in the morning we thought we'd never lose
Where I'm still sleeping in
It's a lazy sin
Please don't wake me when you go to work
When I came to
The thought of you
Fiercely pierced my
Bothered skin
Grandfathered in
To fence the present tense
Inside a murk
I can't bear to think of where
The moments go
The underwear peels and reveals
A layer so slow
Do I dare to think of there
That others now know?
The pubic hair and cubic square
Of every strand of banded glow
Down in the morning we thought we'd never lose
On your sister's pull-out couch
Where you heard me vouch
For the existence of what's inside
It was true
Until it died
But what killed it?
You willed it
And I woke up
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8. |
Little Henrietta
05:10
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Little Henrietta
From the discount hair salon
I invented you to come undo
The torture I've been thrust upon
I'm a rolling pin
A half-deflated soccer ball
Left to brittle in the yard
In the spittle of the broken fall
I'm the scared aggression
Of a little dusk dog's bark
Middling and piddling
In the safety of the dark
Pontiac's been tainted
Rochester is done
Chipped toenails are painted
By the blacked-out friend that was
The carsick sun
But little Henrietta's from the same township as me
So natively she knows about
The coughing memory
Now everything I see is full of
Coffee
And the lofty little
Hope of love
Every day for you my
Lovely little one
Scratch your back and never slack
Or back away from our first day of profuse dripping sun
Darling
Some chipped-tooth baby doll I had
Stung me like that day
That I rode my bike into a wasp
Then Pizza Hut to wash away
All that stinging cruelty
You'll understand, I pray
The future is a creature that
Can only hope to lick the love
Its tongue tastes of today
But little Henrietta and the pillows on her bed
Where really we just kill
The memory that won't stay dead
With a tendency for spilling silly
Coffee
And the lofty little
Hope of love
Every day for you my
Lovely little one
There are three blades in my back
But two of them are yours to track
And see where they've begun
Darling
Little Henrietta
I have had three wives
You're my only ghost
The organs I have lost control of
The roll of film I can't dispose of
How your memory survives
Like communion host
Or floating with the burnt toast
That was coasting in my grandpa's daily
Coffee
And the lofty little
Hope of love
Every day for you my
Lovely little one
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9. |
Counterfeits
02:43
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10. |
A&W Orange and Brown
07:55
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You taste like A&W
Orange and brown
Draw through your straw
Wash it all down
The strange age
The gas gauge
The rash upon my ribcage
But you'd never leave me in the lurch
Or deceive me when the search
For the morning
Gets boring
Mechanically scorning
Twenty-thousand broken tunes
A galaxy of afternoons
Birthdays of November ruins
Are soon to be my vehicle
I'll be dozing in the divorced dads'
Devastated bachelor pads
It subtracts and then it adds
But all in all it's a miracle they do
That's when
I go where the college kids loiter
Just hang out and reconnoiter
The umbrage
The language
With each dumb pang of anguish
I think about how I spent my year
In a twin bed with young skin near
So blindly
Remind me
How you snuck that knife behind me
Some nights it's achingly ample
Some nights it's just a sample
Stamp a little dimple in the
Simple love you think is yours
But who's in your camp when the world darkens
Dampening with snarking grins?
The parking situation thins
When unwieldy eras lock their doors
'But you know
I got a lot for you
But it'll never do
Oh, unless
Well, nevertheless
You go
Do what you gotta do
If you're not so true
I guess A&W
Is fading too
We'd walk through the town in an endless loop
In the rapidly melting ice cream soup
That stuck us together
In Frontier Ruckus weather
But ain't it precious?
The freshest scrape?
I faced rewind and erased the tape
And I saw
It all go
But I still hear the audio
Our sitcom plot line's terrible
It rots on the vine like a parable
Written by the veritable human punchline
You now kiss
I'll be driving around the Silverdomes
With the student drivers and mobile homes
The worst survivors of all my poems
Would never treat someone like this
I bet
Your makeup's indelibly smeared on that towel
I once feared it was permanently on me as well
Like the cinder
From that winter
And the slush along Dequindre
The ride that we got from the mechanic shop
From the Persian woman in the Mercedes drop-top
Her marriage
Miscarriage
We thought her stories bonded us in awareness
We thought nothing like that could happen to us
We were two of the luckiest
Bastards in the mastered art of
Barely ever giving a fuck
But in the end one fuck got gave
Two, if you count our literal behavior
The root beer, dear
Will you please save a drop for me, as you cutely suck?
'Cause you know
I had a lot for you
But it'll never do
Oh, unless
Well, nevertheless
You go
Do what you gotta do
If you're not so true
I guess A&W
Orange and brown are through
It'll be just like we never knew
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Frontier Ruckus Detroit, Michigan
Michigan band inviting you to enter a dense & dimming world.
Frontier Ruckus recommends:
Sitcom Afterlife Bedroom Demos
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