Barbelith Underground > Conversation > Lyrics of your life 2008

Garage Sale. Saturday. I need to pay my heart's outstanding bills. A cracked-up compass and a pocket watch, some plastic daffodils, the cutlery and coffee cups I stole from all-night restaurants, a sense of wonder (only slightly used), a year or two to haunt you in the dark, a wage-slave forty-hour work week (weighs a thousand kilograms, so bend you knees)--comes with a free fake smile for all your dumb demands, the cordless razor that my father bought when I turned seventeen, a puke-green sofa, the outline to a complicated dream of dignity, and a laugh (too loud and too long). For a place where awkward belongs, or a phone call from far away with a, "Hi, how are you today?" and a sign that reads, "Recovery comes to the broken ones."
Or best offer.

Measure me in metered lines, in one decisive stare, the time it takes to get from here to there. My ribs that show through t-shirts and these shoes I got for free; I'm unconsoled, I'm lonely. I am so much better than I used to be. Terrified of telephones and shopping malls, knives and drowning in the pools of other lives. Rely a bit too heavily on alcohol and irony. Get clobbered on by courtesy, in love with love, and lousy poetry. And I'm leaning on a broken fence between Past and Present tense. And I'm losing all these stupid games that I swore I'd never play. And it almost feels okay. Circumnavigate this body of wonder and uncertainty. Armed with every precious failure, and amateur cartography, I breathe in deep before I spread these maps out on my bedroom floor. Leaving. Wave goodbye. Losing, but I'll try, with the last ways left, to remember. Sing my imperfect offering.

I count to three and grin. You smile and let me in. We sit and watch the wall you painted purple. Speech will spill on space. Our little cups of grace. But pauses rattle on about the way you cut the snow-fence, braved the blood, the metal of those hearts that you always end up pressing your tongue to. How your body still remembers things you told it to forget. How those furious affections followed you. I've got this store-bought way of saying I'm okay, and you've learned how to cry in total silence. We're talented and bright. We're lonely and uptight. We've found some lovely ways to disappoint, but the airport's always almost empty this time of the year, so let's go play on a baggage carousel. Set our watches forward like we're just arriving here from a past we left in a place we knew too well. All too well. Hold on to the corners of today, and we'll fold them up to save until it's needed. Stand still. Let me scrub that brackish line that you got when something rose and then receded.

Hold on.