1. |
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This cereal’s a distraction as much as my phone is. Has anyone ever spent time alone? It’s impossible. Staring in my head at its voices and its wires, so eloquently dangling carrots to keep the real thing at large.
Doing the dishes alone with no podcast on, check my proverbial shoulder like that’s inherently wrong. Our pets don’t understand the lawn guy, but he’s stressing them out. We can’t explain to them, then what makes us think god is gonna help?
Life’s a sedative. But why do we need calming down? I didn’t get off the couch to just feel bad. It’s a useless game without prehensile brains.
They say “How do you get so much done?” Well, how do you not? With those extra hours, can you shut your brain off? How do you snooze the silence?
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2. |
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The old anglepoise lamp, holding strong at 12am. Not top of the class and this volcano idea is far from new. Paper mache galaxies surrounded the waste basket. Is this DNA or just the details of Elmer’s glue?
It’s just bad art. Or bad code. The class might laugh, but I won’t. No one’s at fault. Who could’ve known? The class might laugh, but I won’t.
Stage fright the next day in the hallway, seeing better ideas.Play-Doh dialectics, toothpick phenomenology, a colored shoebox that can bypass death. If only, he had the bigger box of crayons with teal and harmony.
If you sit still you can feel the Earth collecting dust in the garage.
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3. |
Snakes in the Walls
03:10
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There’s a beige, tree-painted wall behind my headboard. It starts shaking out of nowhere. My brother, you look concerned, and so sure. Saying, “There’re snakes behind your head and through the rafters, writhing when they’re upset.” I can’t prove you wrong. But what an odd stance to take to heart.
Why the fuck would you start there? No, it’s not God. There’re no creatures in the walls. Our twin theologian bed-frames, could’ve solved anything. But since when can I not talk to you? Talk to you. Talk to you.
It’s just the other side of the wall. It’s just dad on the bench grinder. It’s just the washing machine. I was just drumming with my feet again.
You’ve got every little answer: How they all got in there; how they’re living off cellulose; why the book of Joshua doesn’t apply. But you can’t work backwards. There are simpler answers.
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4. |
Dog
00:57
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Locking eyes with the dog in the middle of grace. He sits with an anarcho-primitivist smile on his face. Not getting pissed at the ritual must be pretty hard. Because I agree, it’s not more interesting than anything in the yard.
Are you picking up what I’m not? For what it’s worth, I think you’re better off. Are you picking up what I’m not?
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5. |
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We all say, “Of course they go to heaven.” Romans 2:12, you skip the law. Between their first breaths and bicycles, fate’s in the air. If life’s a flash, who’s counting how we get there?
Fortified with foes on my lawn. Sweet Pastor Mark fumes across the street. Their fear versus my medical and divinities degrees. Like Christ, I am slow to speak.
It’s always self sacrifice. No one forced me to be here. I’m not waking up, hurting my church cause it feels fun. I can rest well with misery, there’s no millstone around my neck.
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6. |
Home to Any Possibility
00:42
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Kim G*tty’s got you chewing on your cheek in between shifts with the gag. Top slave on their finest dinner trays, with Machiavellian aromatics.
Get your hands off my future. Get your claws off my time. You didn’t teach me how to write this.
Which of your kids are rooting for divorce? You could guess if you tried. The great martyr’s shock collar rules your life and barely fits around your neck.
Get your filth off my Sunday. Get your claws off my 9pm. You didn’t teach me how to write shit.
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7. |
Worms
02:32
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I’m a sheep on a Boeing cattle run. And for a split moment on the tarmac, the air traffic control guy wins. Standing carelessly in the sun, boarding group vitamin-d, oh, I think that’s where I’d rather be.
When it comes to life, someone's kicking your ass with half the dreams, one-third of the cash.
Felt malaise in an Austin corner store. I bought gentrified canned sardines, gave a $20, only got $2 back. But did you hear that new study? Touching microbes in the soil supposedly works better than Prozac.
When it comes to life, worms are kicking our ass, with hourly dreams, no concept of cash.
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8. |
Carsick on Inisherin
03:32
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I need privacy, but can’t stand to be alone. Despair’s looming over the both.
It’s gonna hurt to no end, I know. An arm, a leg, a finger, a friend, a window. I’ll trade your shield from despair in my life for a frequency that I heard one time.
I need privacy, but can’t stand to be alone. Despair’s looming over the both. And I’m carsick, sleep deprived, hungry for a fist fight. Subtract, subtract, subtract, subtract until something feels right.
Life’s just heavy, it’s elation or grief, and when it’s mundane you feel the weight that it shouldn’t be. Isolate the variables—no more Padraic, no more pints—if I’m still up at night, I’ll know why.
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9. |
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I’ve got a bindle to hold both the Gameboys and a sadness-shaped hole. Leaving my yard but I’m not sure that I’m leaving home.
There’s a holographic pain. Some itinerant life flashes morse code from the blue sky, and it costs a lifetime to play.
I’ve been dreaming past telephone lines, planning how I’d brave the rain. Something on TV implied that’s what I’m supposed to do. My friends aren’t brave enough.
There’s nothing to figure out.
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10. |
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I never called it fine art. It’s advertising with cherubs and forlorn saints on the stone ceiling of which I’m not interested or even vaguely aware of. It’s another’s religious fetish. And it's tacky as hell, but it swiftly becomes my will when the Medicis pay the bills. The Medici’s pay the bills. The Medici’s pay the bills.
I’m a chameleonic propagandist. I can pitch, perform and lie. Pitch, perform and lie. Quieting inner, fervent atheism for shelter, security, milk, honey and paint supplies. It’s a job, it’s a craft, it’s design that the materials obscure, but I’m the first to be a shill when the Medicis pay the bills. The Medicis pay the bills. The Medicis pay the bills.
What’s the point of a bed if you can’t sleep at night? What’s the point of a house if you can’t live with yourself? What’s the point of these things if you can’t stomach to think: you didn’t even have to sell your soul?
A life if but just one vote. Lest the history books immortalize and multiply a corpse’s ballot upwards of a dozen, a hundred, one-thousand times. Such legacy anxiety. But what do I owe the future? I only ask because it’s too late. I know deep, deep down that I am only what I create. What happens when the context dissolves with the world, and that ceiling is my mirror? No new caveats, no framing, no translations, no stories, no reasons, no history to tell, no Condivi, no Ghirlandaio, no Caprese, no Florence, no Raphael, no Romans, no pope, no normal excuses, no passions, no skills, no Medicis, no bills. Just the work.
Just the work. Just the shell of the church.
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11. |
Office Ambience #2
01:17
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12. |
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You can swap cleaning basil out of the pool or feeling lost lost a potluck for squinting eyes at the beach to see you. It’s a two-bedroom brain. The lives are furniture, you have to trade.
Watching ants move around a stick feels sacred, but not like that stomach ache outside Dayton, you gave me great advice and I didn’t take it. It’s a two-bedroom brain. Pick one scent of love, three textures of pain.
Time handles out memories like some shit on a shelf. Let me deal with clutter; I can prove it wrong. Time’s tossing out memories like some junk at a yard sale, trying to get paid. Just don’t force my hand, I know I have to trade.
I’m no bird of the air, I’m no lily of the field. I don’t know their lives, I don’t know their songs.
(Medley from previous song lyrics)
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Topiary Creatures Nashville, Tennessee
Hi, we're Tope Creach. We play sparkly, maximalist punk rock.
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