Do your hands maybe shake, and you don't know what for? You could use a deal. Yeah well, so could I. We each wanna be picked up, but never do the picking ourselves. Sometimes, all you gotta do is pick up. It's an underrated quality. A good, salt-of-the-earth quality that often gets swept up... In painting blame and cold wind and winter night. Lone winter night. First night. Away or afar?
How many more to go? Will go? Or will I? Should I? I'm turning into a rag-and-bone man under all this added weight. Shed weight. Lent. Relent. Crazy how my words sound like yours, yet your mouth don't taste like mine.
Do you hold fast on this, first winter night? Would you break your sleep to shy me away from evil? I don't think so. I don't fear so. Don't know. You can't go hungry if you cover your ears, or you can, but it slows it down. The loss. It tells you to go slow down the stairs, that there's just enough time for you to evacuate before this building comes to a screeching halt. You believe it, because you have to. You cover your ears. You begin again, even though each time you have to, you feel a little more ashamed. Turned out you didn't know the words or the how this time round, either. You've gone and made a fool of yourself again. Forgot what you're running from.
When thou dost hear that I am as I was. Yeah. It hurts, the sound of things coming to an end, of your today turning into your past. Hurts worse when I start getting anxious about not doing enough. Not getting my words out all in a row. Not getting them right.
Sometimes, I wish my face made sense even when the song ends, but the needle just skips in my bump and bruise dents. Eventually, the song loops back again, but I'm never there. I've smelled the toxins and ballooned up. Long gone. Don't think you're supposed to burn through it all this fast. Think there's a leaky exhaust somewhere, and me, too exhausted to find it. Haha. But why didn't you tell nobody?
But why would you tell anybody when you get a clear idea of what's past and what's future, already? I may be marking time for you, but I ain't no martyr. When I - this - ends, it'll be a car crash. Explosion. When Kurt killed himself, Neil Young started telling people he didn't want his music ending life. Sometimes, I try to imagine that. Not the Kurt, but the Neil. The why. The looking through old notes and finding a film of blood. The shame when your good creates something evil.
When the nights get cold enough, I'll go out in the snow and burn them at the witching hour. The pictures of the people I thought we could be when I still thought we were good people.
Do you think it hurts when she breathes? What, her lungs? No, I reckon not. And the smaller flip-flop pillow-hair voice says okay and rolls back to the wall. And the big hair knotting at the back, kitchen-smell-on-fingertips voice stares up at the ceiling, at the light outside, at the future sleep that will in a heartbeat be a nightmare it can't remember.
Except it isn't okay. It's not okay at all.
I wonder if it would be, though, if I wasn't me, but man. If I had all that different strength and could square my shoulders a different way without looking all silly. Would that make being me more or less? I didn't realize it takes so much out of you. How brilliant it can be.
Told you I'd never do it. Never even crossed my mind, not once. But. There's that leak somewhere. One day, we'll run out of things to say. One day, you won't wanna be you anymore or might stop being able to, and how and why would I continue being me, when you're not around to be you?
How fast do I need to ride, so that the feeling and the losing people burn each other out?
The words in the picture are from Sarah Kane's "4.48 Psychosis", easily one of the most aching things I've ever read. If they made souls in ink, that would be it.
