My girl, sunday: A Poignant Jam
By The Bustling Townships
recorded wolfgang's house, may 24th 2009
tracklisting: Sean Archery/lost It/Mo' Honey, Mo' Bees/lions, Or Lambs?/ten stars/A bugs' party!/There is Dinosaur Air, Everywhere/Bubblegum Bubble Blower/Stately girls/Natural Disaster/x-mas song/Runaway Johnny/tugboat
Pt. I
Whispering 'I hate myself,' while waiting in some hospital for this someone else, prince charming in a white labcoat. He says he cares. You won't answer my calls. You're busy falling out of love with the scene inside your head and everyone is a part of it, but you. Loose leaf paper, numbering in the hundreds, littering your floor. You answer silent rings, and open doors to no one and nowhere. You are sad and elated. Mood swing baby wishes every word we spoke be charged with meaning, like lightning in a bottle. You are ready for amazing things to happen. A picture perfect expression of a love, purer than your mother's love for him (a lover's artful spin). Faked, drugged, southern accents on real kids? It makes no sense to me, but nothing ever makes no sense to me. You are spitting paint on canvas. You are spilling blood on sheets. You are crying in the atrium, on a tour of lobbies, across the state. Saving your pretty face for cameras in the mirror, you're performing on, for, and with everybody that you meet because everyone's a stage and everyone's an audience. Everyone's a goddamn critic. All my entrances consist of 4:00 a.m. nostalgia trips to old bedrooms and swingsets near the high school. Where the ruin lies, years former falling from your eyes. How can I control if I can't even stop my own two hands from shaking long enough to knock whatever is in yours down to the floor? Whispering i hate myself while waiting in some hospital. This someone else, prince charming in a white lab coats, he says He understands. It has been a long time coming, but I have lost it. I am so tired, like I've never known sleep. I'm scared stiff that you'll go and never come home but then, again, I'm the one prone to running around. It's just dumb luck that's kept us together this long. I am dumbstruck you ever fell for these dumb songs. Tough love never works out just how I want but neither does any other sort... Dear Rain, Would it make it OK if you hear your name when you press play? A dead eye's worthless when you're aimless enough to care, and your bull's eye's just a blank stare. Hitting a dead end, I hate us enough to die but, to a dead man walking, it's the same as staying alive. It has been a long time since sleeping was close enough. I'm a weak man, and there's no one to call my bluff...I've hated us both enough to throw myself into the dark. But that's a long walk off a longer dock. When you say 'Go.' What do you mean? To move on, pass away, or should I just leave? I lost my girl, my family, and my edge. What do I have, really? A couple records. Powell keeps me company. I still have my health. What the hell happened to me? There, in Egypt, we read riddles written by gods, never meant for humans' minds. Curiosity passed over many sleeping cats before it took our lives and took up all your time. I awoke from that fiery feeling in a furnace whence the flames carried me back to sleep, into a freezer, to freeze the lipstick in place where you had kissed my cheek. I could smell conspiracy. I kept in mind that you don't like me, and I don't like me. But, past that fact, it was cool breeze, calm seas, and smooth sailing, and a map torn in half. And that kiss on the cheek. Maybe, I could sleep in the tree in your mother's front yard. I could watch you while you sleep, through your window. You'd be safe from harm under my watchful gaze, and you could dream of other boys. I don't really mind. If you waked up, shaking and scared, from a nightmare, you could look through the glass to the topmost branch. I'd wave, you'd wave; go back to sleep. Do you look down at a road and see adventure? As if everything black was a darkness to enter. Dear, shadows belong to creatures whose skeletons were never paved over. I swear. I will stray no further than you can call me back for dinner. Though, this emptiness is not a hunger wishing to capable of murder. If our surfaces seem polar opposites, then we are sides of the same round object. Our mouths close upon each other, secret saboteurs locked in battle. Our limbs are the lions of a voltron, magnets of a great destroyer. When every breath is a jawbreaker that makes up some great tornado, cutting lines into the earth like an ice skater, we'll replace this monster with another. I am a romancer of stone, on my lonesome on the road, finding rocks of a peculiar, instrinsic value to my field. I walk with my head down on a silent mission. I feel my feet blister, but keep adding to my collection. Keep reaching for those stars. Keep grasping at straws. Keep missing my mark. Keep falling apart. A sad sack, an old grouch, moping and falling out with old friends, hitting dead ends. Why the long face? Spend all my days fighting windmills or standing still. You are a rennasaince, everything I am not. You are someone to believe, something to achieve. I am a humble bee. All the flowers taken, so it seems that we two are all that is left, but it's less than worth it because I'm less than worthless. Why the long face? Why any face at all ever? Not so clever. Sometimes, I dig a hole and then I look inside the ground and I wish that I lived there with all the new friends I had found. All the worms, centipedes, millipedes and ants; life would be a party. We'd move, groove, mosh, and dance to the sounds of COWER coming from our ghetto blasters, in a joyous, cacophonic mix of insects' feet and my own laughter. Then, I look outside the ground and see I don't want to be. My dad is mean. My mom is mean. The girl I like doesn't like me. I feel like a loser, like your love is some stupid sport in which I lay bleeding, with tear streamed cheeks, out of bounds on the court. So count me out of this one ref, I don't want to play again. I'm done mixing my metaphors, so I'll just say your name: Tasche Khan. I don't care that your a stella, and a chippy, and a lush, or that all of my friends know you as 'Jumanji Slut'. I know that he's a cutie, and goes to your same school, but you should realize he's really quite the tool. I made you a tape. I put Jawbreaker on it, because when Blake sang, I could relate, so I'm asking you on a date for the rest of your life. Meet me where the pink petals have, and always will, fallen the thickest near the dogwoods at the top of the hill. I'll be buried beneath ten feet of soil, because there I have made place where I could be your boy. I'm asking you on a date, for the rest of your life. This is where you belong: in a song, with me.
Pt. II
I've liked you for a long time. I liked you for a real, long time. You said no at a show, but I insisted on walking you home. We walked through the coldest autumn, kicking leaves along the way. You said that you loved the fall, then, later, you said you loved the fall again, like I didn't understand. Like I didn't like Fall as well. You brought up a picnic, and it sounded like a good idea. There were bodies buried beneath us, coming to get us. You told me not to worry. You schooled me, and told me, "There is dinosaur air everywhere!" and time is not so linear, and bodies can't hurt me, and that you really like the fall. I'll tell you, that that sentence, it moved something inside of me. It moved my insides around in me. It moved me. Maybe it was the syntax, or maybe it was the way your mouth moved around the words like an orange. Like you were eating a delicious, yet very citric, orange. Alec kept calling, so I told him my phone was dying. I thought if we finished walking we'd understand that we understood. But then time caught up with me, and everybody had passed me. Fall only comes once in a year. But if love could be simple, we'd stay here forever, and it would be fall, all year, every year. The moon in Dublin this summer hung like a dog, from the gallows of Heaven. Strung up by his mustache, he was angled as bait, before the pigtails and red-checkered dresses of the girl he had called Home. The one who took his poems, replaced his inkwell with brown liqour. Visions of his pale, french fingers dancing on her belly called him home, to Mother Korea. Bubblegum bubble blower, so contrived and pretty in pink; your hair caught in a lawnmower looks pretty funny to me. The summer spent, picking petals from flowers, and floating them down to the sea, singing "He loves me..." or "He loves me not..." but, honestly, in this light you've erased everything about you that was ever dear to me. "We're so far from our homes, on our opposite poles," she sang, soft and low, without panic. "I'm a little bit lost," he admitted, arms crossed. Her song churned his stomach as she sang it. Two permanents tourists in transit on ships wrecked, in the shallows, panning gold like their fathers, icebreakers, minesweepers, her Great Aunt, the palm reader, could not save us from each other. Now this island doesn't seem so familiar anymore. She couldn't believe how understanding her family could be. 'What do I keep him around for, what is it I need? White boys catch fire for me!' He forgot himself in her. 'Why does she keep me around? I'd lose my head if it wasn't screwed so tight on my shoulders. Where is my angel, where did she go?' This girl has driven her back to her home in the clouds. In the gallows. Girls named after states, flowers, and their Grandmothers, who, in turn, were named after flowers and states. You came into the picture, flickered in and out of focus, a natural disaster from head to toe. Some chemical reaction happening south of the border; you caught a man red-handed on some video camcorder. Calling in the cavalry to fix your television. Open heart surgeouns, with laser-like precision. A cruicial time to classify the files in the cabinets. A crass ultimatim in water-cooler conversation. Why can't I? 'What's up, you guys? When will my people come together?' Christmas time is your favorite time, but it's just winter to me; ornamental sentiment hung on a well-pruned family tree. I'm not with the one person that I really care for. I'll wrap my love in sunday funnies to leave beneath the wreath on your door. Deck the halls with boughs of holly. Do you hear Christmas bells calling? Stay with me, dear, sweet Melanie. Walking through a snowy grove, arm in arm, I wish I could promise you that we don't come to harm. But there's bear in this wood, and monsters between those sheets. Your mom and dad are home, but we won't make a peep. sdhgfansudygapwrhgfavynrtlui4ewmngvurgmludasjlvhgl, apples I pick from trees, I eat in the hay. Your love, I like it a lot, but it's no good for me. Put it back within your magic bag, and then go climb a tree. Juh juh. Juh juh. Johnny, where did you go? Johnny, why did you leave, from me? Johnny, please come back home. Bigsby, I pet him, then it makes me feel nice. Igloos are homes for people living in the ice. Your hair is short, black, and does not smell like shampoo. But that doesn't mean that it smells bad! It, actually, smells quite good! You are a little tugboat pulling me across blue, painted seas. Sails ripped, my stringers grown. All of my friends jumped ship long ago. Without so much as an S.O.S., you delivered me from deliverance. Your rescue might seem fool hardy now, because I won't go unless you're pulling me. This towline has pulled my heartstrings apart. So, now, I have no heart. I am a broken vessel; nothing can carry me. You were a happy little tugboat, until you came across the likes of me. Now I'm a wreck, nothing can change that. I feel the tide, pulling me down. If I'm a wreck, nothing may change that; I just want to not go down alone.
