This is me playing a song written and originally played by Strand of Oaks. Yup.

Diamond Drill (Strand Of Oaks Cover)

War Song

Halloween (The Gaslight Anthem Cover)

Track 1 off Sleeping Cranes "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

The windmills were tilling up the sky,
dripping the pink sun all down Second Street.
Drove past our old house in the Avenues.
Wondered when it'll all catch up with me.

Routine shrunk the years and pushed us
to the roomy promises of our daydreams.
Stood on the front steps for the last time
just blinking.

Through August leaves, the wind wheezed like a coiling spring;
I felt a confluence, felt a plunge and lift like a disappearing dream.
And I felt a pang of how this place will feel in my smeary memory.
I hope one day it'll all catch up with me.

Confluence

Track 5 off of Sleeping Cranes' "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

There are days I feel estranged
like I felt when you lifted your head
from my chest, and recalled your dream:

You plucked the harvest moon from the black sky
and sawed it into wedges with a butter knife.
Fingernails yellowed by chalky, bitter rind.
No navel to smell to tell if it was ripe,
so you offered me a slice.

Flesh taut and bound, we bit down.
Like fruit, it burst eager and honest.
It made me embarrassed, 
and I couldn't taste anything with you watching me.
Then you kissed me, pulp still in our teeth
and they felt like little fingertips pinched
in the cracks of a wall of a dam.
And I shouted "oranges are miracles,
the moon is a miracle, to breathe is a miracle.
Does that make us a miracle?"

But closeness whispers the same worries that it always does.
Our fears insistent, prattling on 
like a radio left on in the apartment up above us.
Oh.
We could lose years to each other.

There are days I feel estranged
and I retreat to the pleasant noise in my head.
You dreamed a pretty scene riddling some distant thing
and I almost knew what it meant.

But I want time to wonder at the origins of your alien kiss,
at our laughter tangled in cautious chorus, 
as we sound out the shapes and the shadows
as our eyes adjust to this brief newness.

Oranges

Track 2 off of Sleeping Cranes' "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

I wonder how we might've looked;
You standing, holding me in the living room,
striped in shadows of open blinds and
banners of milky night jaundiced by streetlights.
I flinched through the chilly pinch of pre-dawn dark;
I-44 was empty.

I've been picking strands of your cobwebby ghost
from my skin since we were seventeen.
And the space that kept you out of reach
on quieter nights will gust against me.
But until tonight incubating this achey churn
hadn't opened any doors to words.

I used the bridge of my nose
to find your collarbone
and pooled a long sigh into it.
I said "there are nights I'm certain
that I loved you then.
There are nights I am worried that I still do."

I remember you in a donut shop, 
the puddles of pale copper in your blue eyes,
you arms folded in the habit of cold.
Startled to still find parts of you I did not recognize.
We walked arm in arm through the morning drunks,
plastic beads, and barricades in the Soulard streets.
And I imagined for a moment that 
for all these years you had loved me.
I always hoped I'd just outgrow this silly dream.
I will miss chasing you and your memory.

Fat Tuesday

Track 3 off of Sleeping Cranes' "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

I knew it was a dream when I could feel each color and consonant
stirring inside my ribcage like an assembling summer rain.
Your hair, it fell in lazy waves like it did before you cut it;
before you moved out east and picked a model's name.

The hysterical sky spinning spools of black and orange and amber
rolling and bloating above the junior college where we met.
I thought the end would come like a shattering, 
but we were talking on a picnic bench,
crumbling handfuls of the ag building in the silence.

A looseleaf paper ring that we found around your pinky,
and unfolded to find an atlas of conversations we had shared.
Those years all feel half lived in, the words all feel half learned from.
But we're here now, the clouds are a bleary, panicked red.
Like the red that you once used to describe your restlessness.

Tiffany, I know that morning will come to drag me
from the fevered splendors of this humid dream,
where we’re rummaging through the wreckage of old lives and old selves
we didn't realize we'd forgotten in Wyoming.

So let me hold you, let me tell you how I'll miss these mountains,
the new parts of themselves old friends will find that I will never know.
I'm not sure if this is healing, or just gluttonous nostalgia, 
but goddammit, I don't want to let go.

Laramie County Apocalypse Dream

Track 4 off of Sleeping Cranes' "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

Learned the half windsor;
some tutorial online.
In Markus’s kitchen,
this college town you and i had lived in.
took the highway to make the ceremony on time.

had to keep reminding myself:
“this isn’t home.”
every all night diner,
every cross street still archived
and moving my muscles.

folding chairs, raw sunlight.
the hottest part of the day.
my black wool cardigan,
the backs of your parents,
the prickly buzz when the blood left my face.

It was enough to just be here,
so close to our old house.
Running trailheads in Tucson,
exposed brick, and dream jobs.
all the lives that we told ourselves.

But you crossed the dance floor of stumbling toddlers.
Each step another stone on my chest.
The buoys in our faces,
our shop counter cadence,
laughter clucking from our corseted nervousness.

Saw Sara and the baby.
Asked her what it was like.
She said “it’s this sustained release,
ever joy, ever grief;
the first time he walks might be the last time he crawls.”
While I strained to hear what you were whispering
to your sister in the empty reception hall.

Time will make constellations of our cruelties and missteps. 
But the stars seemed so close there, 
buckshot light around my head.
I think I’m still too young to understand 
that anything truly ends.

Half Windsor

Track 6 off of Sleeping Cranes' "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

I went to shower.
I couldn't watch you pack your things.
Took off my clothes, 
then rushed to get the door closed.
Suddenly afraid you'd see me naked 
next to the bed we'd shared these last three years.

I walked the wet night 
to the Logan Street viaduct.
Sleet spitting a wet static 
through the dark streets.
I was waiting on a summons or a sentence or salvation
while the trains sawed the city in half below me.

And I remembered your body,
our bed pooling me to the spaces you were not.
In my memory, you were smiling, staring up at me,
rinsed golden in some sunset we never saw.

Your hands covered in flour.
Fumbling with mixing bowls,
bribing the dog out of the kitchen.
I could nearly hear you humming
from the front porch where I smoked.
I wanted to so badly to love you then.

And I woke up sweating in the driver's seat
in a parking lot in Marion, Indiana.
And I imagined what your house looks like in Oregon.
I wonder if I'll ever see you again.

Marion, IN

Track 7 off of Sleeping Cranes' "Lives We Tell Ourselves".

Fanning your toes in a comforter cooled by the open window. 
Morning streaked over the plastic stars you puttied to your ceiling. 
We were so young when we first started counting the watching eyes. The arithmetic of palming necks and drifting sighs. 

I carry my worry in my stomach. 
You carry yours through the flowers on your spoon ring. 

And I feel my chest tighten around the caution in your kiss. 
Black blood and nacre 
layer on decades of layers. 

Stones and meals we skipped to guess how we might be worthy. 
Still walk on the tiptoes learned for our third shift fathers. 
We were so young when we started seeing movies as manuals. 
Fell for their formulas, their staircase myths. 

Now in your room, my ears hammer my heartbeat. 
Seems both a part of and apart from me. 

So will we grow silent, our insides stressed to pearl? 
Just the sound of our bellies clacking as we negotiate the bed, 

to wake panting and puckered? 
All our dreams are salt. 
Foraging each other’s white, wool tongues. 
But the thirst is where the work is done. 
You are the rain. 
Love is a cup.

sleepingcranes