You are in my mind...
Do you use magic?
The words are spoken...
but are lost, from your lips to mine... ... ... It's the flaw in the design.

To know the source...
It's hard to find a soul.
In a graveyard...
That's haunted...
I'll find a place to call my own... ... ... At my head lay the stone.

...and everyone one sighs...
"I can't believe my eyes".
It was written. On our eyelids.
It was there... For all of time.

For all of time... In my mind...
For all of time... It was there...
The stone.

I could never decide...
Three, Six, or Nine...
Take a deep breath, for the last dive.
All the way, to the bottom of the pool... ... ... Just hold on to that stone.

It's the weight... I can't escape.
It's troubled me so... all my days.
The open mouth in which i will go... ... ... and replace all I've known...

It's designed... as a test of time...
I'll just carry my stone... all the way...
Right up to the door.

The Stone

Don't you think that they.
Were meant to beg.
The same way.
As the... As the rest of us!

Set your sails... in opposites.
It makes me think... Is there a better way.

All of my life I've been cold it's all i know.

Made hard to hold. They say I'm dumb.
They say I'm old. That I'm Impossible.
They say I'm a drunk. They say I don't know.
Where's my stars at. To light my way back home.

All of my life I've been cold it's all i know.
This ain't ah pot of gold.

They want all my money. They say they control.
They wait out storm clouds. I got to blame it on lies.
You dump my heart. my bodies missing.
It's not how we roll. It's out of control.
But maybe were fine. I'm gonna blow my head off.

The second you stumble. The second you crumble.
The second you fall down. The second... oh..

All of my life I've been cold it's all i know.
This ain't ah pot of gold.

Pot Of Gold

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...

The Trash Pile

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