End Of The Day (Cover)

slowzo

Learning by Machine

This was going to be part of a now abandoned remix collaboration with Smiffmaff from 2020.

Lyrics:
So there I was up on the catwalk, practically hanging from the ceiling, frozen like a cement lion as pink insulation crawled on my skin. Andy Scott had destroyed the room. He turned over the metal bunks, sending them clattering on the cement floor. He tore through the bedding with his teeth. He foamed at the mouth. This guy was the same age as me, but his face had shriveled into a monster mask – furrows in his skin that looked painted on, stringy white hair. Did I mention that he killed all our friends?

As he turned over another bunk, growling sub-guttural, his foot caught on a slice of ragged yellow foam padding, and he went somersaulting over the bunk as it toppled to the floor. Splayed on his back and dazed, hands still gripping the frame, little birdies chirped and circled around his head. I jumped down from the catwalk, my palms clapping the cement floor as I landed, and ran out the door. 

Sprinting across the yard and around the house, I assembled snapshots and examined the proofs as if the images contained overripe stem-cells. Two of the hired guys standing in the garden. They both wore their shirts open and had dust peppered in their fried hair. With bare feet, the bottoms course as rocks, the older guy clutched a rake as they stood over a cut-open garbage bag. Inside the bag, little square packets set into the folds like teeth. Some of the packets were sliced open, white powder skirting the valleys of black plastic, wisped away by the wind. They waved to me as I ran into the trees behind the house.  

I found Kevin down by the river. He was sitting in the dirt, half-dried blood forming an arc around his left eye – an ugly sickle-shape joining his eyebrow to lower lip. I thought for sure he was already dead. Kevin wouldn’t look at me – he just sat there in a heap, rattling a baseball around in an empty pickle jar. I took the jar and shook the ball into my hand. He stood up and looked at me. From about three feet away, I hurled the ball directly at his head and he fell face down in the river.

The first Sunday after I got clean, my parents took me to church. We took our seats in the back as Father Mark gagged and pulled the first words of his sermon from his throat like a chain of mucus. A wave of murmuring and fidgeting began to build in the congregation as the video screens on either side of the altar displayed an approaching tornado live from outside. The black funnel strolled down the street in what seemed like half-time, sucking and splitting walls, wrenching foundations from the earth, getting closer, closer... Finally it broke right through the screen, the aluminum siding twisting inward – a splintered braid that snared the drum-set in the corner like an umbilical cord. I helped my parents onto the rough industrial carpet, and we inched our way under the wooden bench. My dad looked at me with a smile and said, “Just like the air-raid drills in the fifties.” 

Everyone in the church was on their knees, clasping the backs of their heads, and I started praying to God with the taste of red wine and toothpaste stinging my tongue. I prayed for all my dead friends and my parents who now seemed so old, but most of all I prayed for my own sorry self; I promised to change my ways – God I just want to live, I promise I will make good, just give me one more chance, I promise... 

The tornado peeled off the roof, and I looked up into the undiluted, paper-white sky and wept. The end.

My Cocaine Story

Folded Into Oblivion

tamera w. with bilious spirits laid out before me i hope to invoke your ghost. this exercise is already at fault - inspiration so much more easily gleaned in retrograde, spurned by brown liquid that eddies in my esophagus, trying to push its way through the epiglottis, then down to the stomach where a noxious substance is detected as villi retract and curl, and finally metabolized in the liver, but of course not without casualty. i don't know if my grandfather drank whiskey but i know that my father did, and together we imbibe without flinching. but tamera w. have you not yet chosen to appear? 

i think it started with a smell. sweat odor clinging to armpit hairs, an essence of sex, the sweet pissy smell of her untouched cunt. a smell i wouldn’t have been able to describe back then, but still recognizable to receptors of more intuitive sensory systems. it was pheromones, insect attraction. walking home together after school, our trickles of conversation never reached the din of cicadas fucking in the trees, but this only happened a few times i know because i did not understand the ritual of pursuit you wanted me to engage. one misunderstanding and i cowered in my awkwardness. my parents never drove us to that fall homecoming dance, and i trudged through the piles of dead leaves in the gutters of F.O. drive with the corduroy collar of my jacket turned up against the biting wind. 

tamera w., i'm not finished with you yet, stay and linger on a moment for you once laughed at my jokes. i was a skulk for so many years and you never knew but i was waiting for you to excise my swollen appendix and cinch my side with sutures made of your bristly pubic hairs. but the inflammation consumed me, and i resigned myself to staring out cold windows at night writing stilted poetry on yellow post-it notes, a thin atonement for my misery. this misery...goddamnit i can't even remember your last name… but, the fact is that my state of unrequitement had been so tangible for so long that it (dis)affected me, it disaffected me...

so tamera w., you were sweet but maybe a little on the cheap side; even at that age you wore too much mascara, but we were young and ripe, budding sex gardens in our right. i've heard there's nothing quite like 15 year old skin and now we'll never know. i can imagine you anchored by children, your cervix distended, still smoking cigarettes - you've contained yourself in a fishtank of sub-mediocrity. But maybe you didn't - your family vacated your laurel glens home soon after i had to force myself to pretend you didn't exist. so in this respect you will always be this beautiful cryogenic hologram of possibility - something to be shelved, re-examined, and lamented every decade or so just like the first three Red House Painters albums.

Dear Mark Kozelek...

I walk for miles 
Even lifted by the wind

Thinking the same thought
Asking the same question
Cogitation 
Rumination

Trying to figure out 
what’s the fucking catch
It’s so hard to tell -
I cut holes in all the nets

I play a lethal game
With no empty chambers

The answers (just) aren’t there
The answers (just) aren’t there
Oh I don’t know
I just don’t know
What I’m supposed to do
With this life
With this life

Flenser Demo Tape - With No Empty Chambers (demo)

World of Truckdrivers - Erasure Threads This Hole (alternate version)

When I'm lonely and restless
I walk to the river
To see if the animals
Will deliver your messages
Your messages

The river is murky
Yet I see my reflection
A stag all alone
White tail waving in defeat
In defeat

The river is murky
Yet I see my reflection
A green-capped mallard
Swimming away in retreat
In retreat

The rapids are rabid
Foam pooling in the gums
Station me as an interloper
Or let me run
Let me run

As an Interloper

Was it too much expansion
And too much retracting?
Are we starting to crack?
Are we starting to crack?

I am whispering
I am whispering to you
Can it be said?
Can it be said out loud?

Am I still good for you?
Or am I just wounding you?
Am I still good for you?
Or am I just wounding you?

I should keep on whispering
I should keep on whispering
I should keep on whispering
I should keep on whispering

Am I shutting down now?
Have I opened up the chasm?
Am I still good for you?
Or am I just wounding you?

I am whispering
I am whispering to you
Now I’ve said it
Now I’ve said it out loud

Are the dreams now less sweet?
Are the dreams now less sweet?
I should keep on whispering
I should keep on whispering

The Trash Pile

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