A Child’s Prayer
        
                  After A Child’s Prayer (Acrylic on Canvass Panel) by Ulysses Duterte, Jr.

Lord, let me love
This puppy Dalmatian
Like someone who has no family
No father
No mother
No brother
No sister

Someone
With no
Slippers

Let my arms
Be its
Home,
My kiss its
Food and
Water  

Let it grow
Like this place
That has lost
All its houses
Amen

​

​To The Passing Of The Nightingale

Where are the songs of spring?
Where are they?
Well, Mr K,
they are harder to find
than they were in your day.
Gone with the nightingale,
Gone with the meadows,
the hedgerows,
the woods,
The habitats lost, 
destroyed.
Destroyed like the food
that people call pests.
Predated. 
Predated by farmers, 
one way or another,
the countryside’s guardians, 
that’s what they say.
The spring singing has ended,
almost over and done.
Aye, you might well ask, Mr K
The singing is not as it was
in your day.




A Fictional Account

This story is fiction.
Made up.
Made up like a face.
First the base, 
the foundation,
then the shadows and highlights,
the blushers and sparklers, 
the reds and the blues 
to add interest and shape.
Then lines for emphasis.
Black,
thick night time black,
outlining the fiction.
So, there was a base
for this fantasy.
There was some foundation.
Even a made up story
has some links
with reality.
A spark from a dream,
an inspiration 
from experience,
mine, or yours, 
​
or someone else’s.
Something written,
something sung.
A word, a phrase, a line
from someone’s life,
their fantastic real life,
or imaginings.
becoming real
in the telling,
when the make up
is removed
and the secrets
are revealed
between the lines.

​

WHY I DON’T READ THE NEW YORKER ANYMORE
 
 
…so I’m thumbing through the magazine
which my roommate subscribes to,
because I wanted to read the piece Robert Crumb did
                                                              about living in France,
after which I flip around to glance at the famous cartoons:
2 women walking down the street, one goes
“I’m retaining doughnuts.”
Ha!—What a kneeslapper.
No wonder this is the top market for humor.
But then, on page 64, I’m caught up short.
There is a poem, entitled “Insomniac”, by Galway Kinnell.
I was intrigued—who would have thought
the ex-poet laureate and I would share a common bond,
an affliction that perhaps his wisdom and artistry
could help me better understand with words to act
as a balm on my blighted existence.
And imagine my disappointment when I discover
the great man’s take on the problem,
spread over two pages of lyricism,
is that when he has trouble nodding off in his big, comfy bed
(with its “oceanic comforter,” according to the metaphor,
 because, dad-gum, that’s what makes a New Yorker poem)
he just reaches over and gropes his attractive, sleeping wife
to while away the time until the Sandman comes.
This is insomnia?
What is this pompous, self-satisfied windbag really trying
                                                                to tell us?
Merely that he, a man at least 800 years old,
has a young thing to warm his bones,
not unlike Abishag and King David
(although to be fair, Kinnell is not really as old as Methusaleh,
 being born in 1927, which puts him more in
 Tony Randall territory.)
I conjecture this from the lines about her brown hair,
slender body emanating heat, and
the breasts calling out to his right hand to cushion
                                                            itself between them,
as opposed to the tender thoughts a spouse of decades standing
                                                             might have inspired,
something along the line of
     “I snuggled my withered loins
       Next to her familiar flabby ass” etc., etc.
Needless to say, I find this information about Grandpa Laureate
and the babe he probably picked up at
some Ivy League writing workshop
of no use whatsoever.
 
It is 1:30 AM Sunday.
I’m sitting in my room, a converted one-car garage,
the walls decorated with my own personal gallery of suicides--
Kurt Cobain, Jesse Bernstein, Danny Whitten,
a reproduction of Arshile Gorky’s “Charred Beloved I.”
In the middle of the west wall is a rendition of “Starry Night”
my daughter did with watercolor, wax crayon, and
                                                                    construction paper.
I remember being quite impressed when she was doing this.
“Where did you learn to make that?” I asked.
“School,” she replied, meaning 1st grade at Lowell Elementary.
What the hell are they teaching these kids, anyhow?
What’s next? After Arts & Crafts they sit in reading circle
for the Scholastic Book version of Artaud’s
“Van Gogh--the Man Suicided by Society”?
Anyhow, it is 1:30 AM Sunday.
I am watching the “Cops” marathon on Court TV,
having already had my principal pleasure of the evening,
“Aqua Teen Hunger Force” on Cartoon Network.
It will be hours before I turn in as, being without
                                                                 medical insurance,
I must conserve my diminishing store of Seroquel,
an anti-psychotic drug prescribed on the theory
that you can’t be psychotic if you’re unconscious.
During commercial breaks from the real-life law enforcement
                                                                   show,
(many of which are set in Pierce County,
 if that tells us anything)
I smoke on the back porch and listen to the idiot birds
chirping 3 hours before dawn,
no doubt fooled into wakefulness by the lights
from the crackpipes in the alley.
O Galway, you ivory tower son-of-a-bitch,
let me explain it to you--
Insomnia is clawing at an imaginary itch and cursing
     the day you were born.
Insomnia is that late-night droning in your brainwaves
     from telephone solicitors who have discovered
     they can reach you telepathically.
Insomnia is trying to figure out who did more Bonds,
     Sean Connery or Roger Moore,
     in an effort to keep more insidious memories at bay.
Insomnia is 20 dirty coffee cups stacked around
     the word processor I haven’t plugged in for three months.
Insomnia is almost dropping off to sleep when
     an icecap cracking on Mars wakes you up.
Insomnia is having to watch those commercials where
     the annoying family law attorney sits in a comfy armchair
     by a crackling fire and says
     “If you are watching this commercial right now
      at this ungodly hour.
      Then your life is really fucked up.”
Or let me put it in terms you can understand--
Insomnia is holding your slumbering trophy bride,
knowing her dreams are of the day
your crinkly carcass is in the ground and,
as your literary executrix,
she sits topless on the beach in Capri
interviewing burly bearded professors who want to be
                                                                 your biographers,
along with scores of nubile blond boys
working on their Masters’ Theses.
 
Sleep tight…
 
 



SCHOLARS
 
 
The Great Library of Alexandria
never revoked your card for
not returning that Bobby Darin tape in 1996,
the one that got shredded by your $19.95
Fred Meyer cassette player just as the final
“Mackie’s back in toowwwnnnn” went swinging
to its final climax
$1643.50 in overdue fines?
Where do they get off with this stuff?
No, in Alexandria the Vestal Virgins of Knowledge
would bear figs and earthenware cups of
medium-priced merlot to the thirsty supplicants
at the altar of worldly wisdom,
a land where overdue fines were unheard of.
As well as tipping.
Today I’m pretending to be a Chinese poet
from the eighth century A.D.,
Tu Fu on his perennial peregrinations of exile,
as I bear my ragged backpack and my own
scrolls of supplication on the Long March
from the Rescue Mission to the
Department of Social & Health Services,
trying to again convince the Confucian bureaucrats
armed with Microsoft Windows 2000 that I’m still not ready
to be a useful member of their society,
joining the other coolies in our banshee wail,
“But our check was supposed to be here yesterday!”
A clear autumn day.
As I descend the plateau, I can almost imagine
I’m coming down Stone Mountain to the Imperial City.
The effect is somewhat spoiled by the toxic smog
spewing from the smokestacks of the Tideflats.
Even squinting really hard cannot transform them
to ornate palaces shrouded in mist,
so I hurry to my refuge--
the Tacoma Public Library.
 
I decided I feel French this morning,
So I pulled a copy of Artaud, a biography of Balzac
from the shelves, along with a compilation of
Surrealist writers and painters
(those upper middle-class frog bastards,
playing at disaster while their doctor and lawyer fathers
pay for their fashionable flats)
and sit at the table, knobby orange library pencil
poised in my fist over the 3x5 index cards
so generously provided,
tortured expression on my face,
in the vague hope that some trust fund college girl
from University of Puget Sound would mistake me for
a Beat poet in the midst of composition
and adopt me for the semester.
Meanwhile, my confederates from the Mission have
wandered in, each focused on their own particular studies.
Some pull collections of Man Ray photographs
off the racks—no need for internet porn
when there’s nude pictures of Kiki of Montparnesse
circa 1925.
Some just pull stacks to the floor and construct
pup tent-like structures which they then crawl into,
evoking a sense of security and well-being
otherwise missing in their lives.
One guy can always be counted on to crouch in a corner,
Philip K. Dick anthology clutched in shaking hand,
and mutter loudly about a conspiracy theory involving
George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Mariah Carey,
and a large buttered artichoke named Leon.
Some go to the bathroom never to come out,
bouncing back and forth off ceramic walls until
the guards escort them out at closing time.
 
The staff surveys all this
with thin, downturned mouths,
lips cracked from lack of saliva,
for all the moisture-inducing mechanisms
in their bodies have long since shut down
except for the production of bile,
which they have in abundance.
Memories flash through embittered brains
generally along the lines of the excitement
they felt in the knowledge that they would be doing
a great service to civilization when they proudly stood in the receiving line
to accept their Master of Library Science degrees
some 900 years ago.
I know—I used to work with them.
What is the use of all this
God damn literature, anyway?
Hell, I’m even nestled among them--
My six pages in a 500-page anthology
filled with the drivelings of a
hundred other losers who thought they were
Clever.
25 years in show business for that?
“I’m published by the same firm that does Bukowski,”
I used to say to women in bars--
Which goes a long way to explaining my eight years of celibacy.
What a lying son of a bitch Chuck was.
And surveying the scene,
I think maybe the Visigoths
had it right when they put the entire shithouse
up in flames two thousand years ago.
After all, we’ll still always have
Wikipedia.
 

Photography by Hayley Hill


                  "A lot of the stories I’ve written about have to do with distance," says New York songwriter Gabrielle Marlena, whose new album Good Music For You releases this Friday. The songs on this record grapple with "leaving behind love" and all of the strain a relationship takes on when two people are separated by continents, "Today it’s so easy to live in the past through social media, so it’s harder to let go of things, and it inspires a lot of music in me." Rescue you, which comes from a piece of advice given to Marlena by her sister: "No one’s going to rescue you" is a uniquely memorable song with a classic, dreamy, Mazzy Star like quality, punctuated with twangy guitars and Gabrielle's soaring, soulful voice, "I've forgotten how to put myself to sleep," the song becoming a meditation on self-love, independence, and perseverance. What does it mean to define ourselves apart from our partners, to come to our own aid in hours of crises, to find the answers, like a phone call, coming from within? Each time a song is reopened so too are the wounds of broken hearts and lost love, but in the moment when that first chord is struck and the voice amplifies and fills the room, when ears and hearts are open, healing, it seems, fills up the space between what happened and where one is now. Hearts always break again, but maybe they break differently, when we become the ones capable of rescuing ourselves. Good Music For You, is exactly that; cathartic, self aware and asking big questions. "Communication," after all "is so important, and it’s the only thing that will get you through."


AHC: What has this journey in music, so far, been like for you, the highs and the lows, and what life lessons do you feel you've picked up along the way?

Gabrielle: I think it’s more about music as an outlet for expression during the highs and lows of general life experience. Music has gotten me through heartbreak, through the stress of college, through moving to new cities, and through fights with my siblings. Music will forever remain a high. Yea, there’s been the occasional singing to an almost empty room, but as long as I’m expressing myself and others are relating to what I’m saying, I’m on a high. In terms of life lessons that I’ve picked up along the way, self-expression solves everything. Never be afraid to send that text, make that phone call, write a song, have that conversation. Communication is so important, and it’s the only thing that will get you through. Songwriting is how I communicate.

AHC: What first drew you to music and what was your early musical environment like growing up? Were there pivotal songs for you then that just floored you the moment you heard them?

Gabrielle: When I was about 9, my whole family participated in the local theater production of The Wizard of Oz. I was a munchkin (hard to believe, as I’m now 6’ tall), my brother was a flying monkey, and my mom played Glinda. I remember I memorized the lyrics to all the songs in the play, and I would help my mom remember her lines, even though I only had one.
    
The theater phase only lasted a short while, but my mom would always sing folk songs to put me to bed. And my dad would make me collect all my concert tickets in a binder. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he had his Fender Stratocaster electric guitar in the attic that he bought when he was 18, which now sits in my Brooklyn apartment. Music was always a topic of conversation, and I chose to focus on Britney Spears, Fefe Dobson, Avril Lavigne, and Vanessa Carlton.
  
“I’m With You” by Avril Lavigne is what comes to mind as my earliest “wow” moment, and I won first place in my 6th grade talent show singing Avril’s “Too Much to Ask.”

AHC: Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote or played? Or that first moment when you picked up a pen and realized that you could create whole worlds just by putting it to paper?

Gabrielle: I don’t think it was the first song I ever played, but my earliest memory of really learning how to perform a song was “Two Points” by Deb Talan, from a mixed CD that my cool older sister gave me. I still play that song today during sound checks. First song I ever wrote? About a boy I had a crush on when I was 12 at summer camp, who happens to now be my best friend.

AHC: Which musicians have you learned the most from? Or writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers/mentors etc? What are the works you could not possibly live without?

Gabrielle: I think music and art is mostly about honesty. The artists that have taught me most about honesty are Alannis Morrisette, Dido, Adele, Amy Winehouse, First Aid Kit, Sharon Van Etten, and more recently, Julia Jacklin, who I talk about all the time. I’m waiting for her to notice. Looking at my Spotify library right now, a lot of the artists I listen to today are focusing on experimentation with sound, which is awesome, but I guess I’m trying to bring back a focus on lyrics.

AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak?

Gabrielle: I think it’s really important to emote several emotions within one song. There need to be motivational bits, soft bits, strong bits, sad bits. The feeling of the listener needs to change over the 4 or 5 minutes, otherwise they get bored. I know I’ve written a good song when I’m out of breath at the powerful part, but then I have a moment to relax and listen to the guitar strings. After all, songs are little more than just stories, and every good story needs a beginning, middle, and end, with a few elements of surprise.

AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, a slightly imperfect vehicle through which to translate a feeling, states of rupture/rapture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener, even if only momentarily?

Gabrielle: I think about songwriting and healing a lot. I struggle with the issue that, though songwriting is cathartic and healing, it also immortalizes an experience that, for other people, might fade with time. For example, the album I’m releasing next month is made up of songs about a relationship that ended two years ago, and I’m going to be singing these songs for the next year and probably for the rest of my life. Though writing them helped me move past a heartbreak, performing them sometimes brings me back to that pain. But you develop a certain type of maturity that allows you to look at your work as exactly that: a piece of work. It’s important to find the emotion again while performing the song, because emotion is what makes a great performance, but you learn to snap back into reality and remember that it’s been two years… chill. But what I’m trying to say is, yes, songwriting saves me. I don’t think I would have the emotional maturity that I do today without it.

AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road?

Gabrielle: Summer camp! Guitars by the fire, singing folk songs, singing Sublime, my friends rapping Kanye West lyrics.

AHC: When you set out to write a song, how much does 'where the world is' in its current moment, culturally, politically, otherwise, influence the kinds of stories you set out to tell?

Gabrielle: Well a lot of the stories I’ve written about have to do with distance, namely the one that is my debut album: leaving behind love in Australia. A lot of it has to do with communicating from the literal other side of the world, and the difficulties of allowing something so strong to fizzle out because of distance and only distance. That kind of story might have existed 100 years ago, but there wasn’t Skype and Facebook messenger and Instagram. Today it’s so easy to live in the past through social media, so it’s harder to let go of things, and it inspires a lot of music in me. Between the ages of 17 and 22, I moved around a lot, from the US to Canada to Europe to Australia to Canada to the US, and I’m so grateful that that movement has been accessible to me, but it comes with it’s difficulties.

AHC: Do you have any words of advice or encouragement for other musicians and singer-songwriters out there who are just starting out and trying to find their voice and their way in this world? What are the kinds of things that you tell yourself when you begin to have doubts or are struggling with the creative process? Or what kinds of things have others told you that have helped push you past moments of self doubt/creative blocks?

Gabrielle: Only write about what you know. People will sense if something is not earnest. I have a tattoo on my arm that says “To be an artist” that everyone loves to ask about, and I hate to answer. I think I saw a quote on Tumblr once that said, “To be an artist, you have to know something that is true,” so I tagged along to another friend’s tattoo appointment and got the first half of that tattooed on me. Don’t know why I only got half. Maybe because full quote tattoos seemed cheesy?

Also, if you’re feeling something while you’re performing, other people will feel it too.

If you’re struggling with the creative process, stop trying to be creative. You can’t force it. The best songs I’ve written didn’t start when I was holding my guitar. They started when I got distracted while doing something else, which is why most of my lyrics begin on my iPhone.

In terms of advice from others, my sister’s advice that “No one’s going to rescue you” inspired my first single, ‘Rescue You.’ That was more life advice than music advice, about learning to count on myself rather than guys, but that’s what songwriting is about, right?

AHC: Your new record, Good Music For You, is set to release this August, could you expand on your ideas behind this record, what its message/appeal to the world is, your hopes for where this lands?

Gabrielle: When I moved to New York and started to meet with my producer Katie Buchanan, I had a folder on my computer of demos that I thought were my “best songs.” They were written anywhere between my first year of college and six months post graduation. I was planning on making those songs into an EP. But I was still stuck on this breakup even after I moved to New York, one year later. I finally realized that I needed closure, and if it wasn’t going to come from this guy, it was going to come from my debut album, 11 songs that told the story of the fallout of my first relationship. Like a line in my song referring to my ex-boyfriend, “You told me heartbreak would help me write, and that was rude but you were right.”

​
​
For more visit www.gabriellemarlena.com/

Good Music For You will be available this Friday. Visit gabriellemarlena.bandcamp.com/ to purchase a copy.

​Cassandra

Unmitigated darkness
Does not prevail
For very long
It being a mere apparition
A False fear
That the new light eventually
Shatters
Our lives
And we Merge and separate
With a hazy, almost mystic rhythm
A magick of no description describable
Each seeking
Something other
Than the other
The blood always wins
In the end
Especially
When the dark falls
Cassandra has left the building
Now you are on
Your own



Bio: Tara Lynn Hawk is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in OCCULUM, Uut, Spelk, Spilling Cocoa, Social Justice Poetry and others. Her poetry chapbook 'The Dead" is available on Smashwords. "taralynnhawk.com" ​

PINK PLASTIC HOUSES

The house you buy at 25 is pink 
and four feet tall.  Twilight Wal-Mart purchase,
you make with cash you mine from men who think
it’s all pretend.  The pigtails and nervous
titter they believe to be a put-on
the five-inch heels, an ache they think you fake
to take their money.  Shake for them till dawn
and buy a plastic puppy, plates heart-shaped
to set a tiny table meant for two.
And it’s just you, in knee socks, hover high
above three stories with something new
to sate the child inside you can’t deny.
A plastic house you furnish with pink dreams,
a woman child, exactly what you seem. 




DIRTY

You want me dirty as you see, the out
to match the in of me.  I tell you all 
the filth inside, each evil deed and doubt,
each cock I ride.  My baby face, they fall 
for fast, those other ones who never last.
They wouldn't do the things you do, to hold
my cheek beneath their shoe.  They'd be aghast 
to watch me crawl, deride your cruel control.
They don't know me at all.  They buy the lie
of how I look.  A princess face, a cry
mistook.  Don't talk to me; don't ask me why
I cannot breathe at times and want to die.
You see in me all the others I've hurt. 
You're not afraid to put me in the dirt.

​

​The Day I Had Nothing & I Read the News

Once I felt compelled by a car crash
that spun off a bridge into the river.
I glided against the sopping wetness of leather seats
as my boyfriend reached up my dress,
and as a child, I remember the commotion
that burst on the neighbourhood street
when I held a half-finished orange in my hands,
and looked over at a car in flames;
the smell of hot metal sticks to my face.
If I kissed fire, maybe the pain would be gradual,
where only a shadow can see me
as a child covered in soot,
still tasting the river water
as we sank into each other,
and turned into sleeping
bodies along the river bed.




Rest In Power

I can feel it when their eyes linger for a second too long. We are under threat; we are under threat. I grab your hand in case they try to take you from me. If you go down with a fight, I will too. We can share a grave here. We can die as bright as a lighthouse, to signal that there is still honour in dying, no matter how ugly.




Someone Asked Me What Life Sounded Like

There was a sound and it rose out of water like the pop of a bubble,
like a teenager who finds hope in a single word text.

There was a sound and it felt like the static of a radio antennae 
kicked by the legs of a woman having sex.

There was a sound and it bellowed out the window, 
What the fuck Karen, laughing.

There was a sound and it was the front door opening at 3AM. 
It was someone’s heart allowing them in.

There was a sound of a young kid’s first kiss. 
There was a sound that sounded like this.



 
A Morning Dosage

He was in rapture, I could tell.
His pupils bulged from his eye sockets.
such pretty stars they are, he exclaimed
as he gazed at the white ceiling fan.

I didn’t understand then how
early in the morning he got to it.
It didn’t bug me that at the bus stop
he held his glass pipe in tin foil
nor that he smoked behind the bench
when a cop car passed.

For weeks, it went on like that.
Bus stop, tin foil, glass.
He gave me my first Jack London novel,
“The Call Of the Wild.”

When he spoke, another voice
claimed he was split into halves,
his personality frayed like
the edges of worn out denim.

He spoke of the voices that argued
amongst themselves, him a single
now multiple man, gone rogue.

And I’d catch him staring off
into the distance, face vacant,
staring at nothing but
the stars Sam, the stars.

Christening

Cousteau’s submarine was named Calypso
I think about this in the desert
Watching the larks and lizards dart from cactus to cactus
Knowing salvation comes in the form of a shipwreck

​

Frost Fair

I’ve never been really east
What I call east would make them laugh
I would go east in time, like so
To fly at the speed of time is to reach a stasis
The last frost fair of 1814 when the Thames froze over
And they marched an elephant across the rime
I dream days when people too
Walked on ice in the spring
Before the thaw, what would you be willing to burn?
The myths we tell ourselves
About the old world
While the new one gathers kindling

​​

​Alternative Comedy
 
A foodie, a feminazi, and a lipstick lesbian
walk into a fondue restaurant and sit down
to eat. That’s it. For like 45 minutes, they
skewer chunks of apple to dip in cheese,
chunks of chicken to dip in oil, then
strawberries in chocolate at the end, but
there is a story arc with the chef (if we can
call him that) practicing molecular
gastronomy in the basement. He is the MTV
generation, or at least what we expect
him to be with Billy Idol hair, Adam Ant
leather pants, Bette Davis eyes—the boy
who’s going to leave this McJob,
hack and slash his way into a new sincerity.

 


At Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah
 
We select our monuments.
You like the arches carved
with vines and thistles,
mausoleums with their copper
doors of eternal welcome,
columns like your own
little Parthenon,
                                  but I say
I am a poet and prefer
pensive woman in chair,
an angel with arms raised
into Spanish moss, or
the concise “Mother” “Father”
in practical black marble.

 


Cecilia and the Weasel
after Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine
 
There you are, over my shoulder,
in the shadows. I am oil on wood,
fluid and solid—real as blood
and bone. Forget me not and keep
me in the light. Find me on the hunt.

 


Brigid Brings the Spring
 
saint or goddess, it is of no matter to me
I planted lilies in my yard today:
tiger, stargazer, bell tower—pink, violet, orange
 
like the sky as the day grows old
and the sun makes its bed behind the earth
with me praying for light rain tomorrow

Prayer to St. Bernadette, the Patron Saint of Lung Maladies

Classical music on my way home from work
And I'm thinking of you
About how nice it'd be if we had a time machine
And there was still a sense of romance in the air
Just so we could wear white gloves
And waltz with ridiculous horses in the mud

Back when the dirt wasn't so lifeless 

Right now in America it's raining somewhere
And the lawn mowers are imprisoned in tool sheds
And drunk dialing earthworms

It'll be so so so nice to see you again
To cut you up into little pieces
Just so there could be more of you to admire 

I'm thinking of you when that piano plays too
Songs about martyrs up on crosses made outta copper piping 

Somewhere in Buffalo
There are backyards messier than celestial bedrooms
When teenage angels first learn about depression
And start hoarding all the clouds 

These are backyards where the grass grows taller
Than the chips on our fathers' shoulders 

Sacred places where diapers crawl off babies
And out of cribs and toward the rot
To cough up the shit that weighs down innocent dreams 

I've seen those diapers embrace emptiness
And shrivel up into things that look a lot like used tissues 

Once the shit's gone
All you're left with is sadness and then you can move on

And I'm thinking about new ways of being sad
When I'm eating dinner and scrolling through my newsfeed 

But everywhere on this planet
There are patron saints who go into this wilderness
And bury streetlight seeds in the dirt 

Because you can't be fooled by the dawn
Or the things you have to do when you wake up 

You can't kill darkness overnight 

It's not easy for the light to grow
But I'm thinking of you when it splits into two
When everybody gets what they deserve

When sadness fades like watercolor paintings
When museums grow old
And can't remember who painted what
And so their walls shake like gray toupees
On the tops of moving trains

But we can't pull the plug on art
Not yet anyway
Until we figure out something new

After dinner I smoke until I can't breathe
And then I venture out into the night to buy more breaths 

And I'm thinking of you
When I'm on street corners coughing up inhalers 

And I'm thinking of you when I run into Jeff
And he tells me about his friend
Who hung himself in the holding center 

And I'm thinking of you
When Jeff tells me that Paddy
Is spinning records over at Rohall's 

And I'm thinking of you
Because the music is still good

​