I’m disassembling piece by piece...
deteriorating, decayed, decreased.
If you’re here, retrieve me.
They checked my flesh,
they checked my heart,
they can’t detect my faulty parts.
But they say you’ll heal me...
...can you heal me?
I plug my ear, bash my fist.
I need some proof that you exist,
that you can reach me.
Can you reach me
now that you bent the bars of the cage,
scraping skin, draining age,
out of view, out of range,
out where no hope remains?
I need your name, Karuna...
When my nerve wore down,
I was assailed by simple little sounds:
hammer clangs, sirens in the park,
like I never heard New York.
Blaring brakes, trapped trucks
honking horns, hissing buses stuck,
shrieking trains barreling berserk,
like I never heard New York.
When the room grew loud,
I learned to stand in back, behind the crowd,
dam canals with cork,
like I never heard New York.
But when the walls gave way,
I had to flee, I had to back away
as the whole town barked,
like I never heard New York.
I’m listening for you, Silence,
but god, there’s so much noise.
And now I fear I’ve found you,
you’re partially destroyed.
I echo in your absence,
voiceless as a swan.
I want you to hear what I hear,
This sound that I found
to replace you while you were gone,
gone beyond...
With folded legs you hold me,
and smiling, calmly mime,
“You worry nothing’s happening,
you’re happening all the time!
So shaken by these changes,
but trying to waltz along...
I want you to hear what I hear:
A tempo, ticking away, beating bygone,
gone beyond...”
Our bodies are temporary, let it be known:
from the start, we start to lose them.
Depreciating vehicles stuck under snow,
shoveled out without illusion.
Try to breathe like you breathed
on your very first try,
like you’re filling you up
with an ample supply for goodbye...
Our bodies are temporary, let it be shown
thru summer evening fading daylight:
violet tissue, into flesh,
into bone, into dust,
into brightest, blackest midnight.
Try to see like you’ll see
at your very last light,
like you’re watching a flood
from a comfortable height for goodnight...
Try to breathe like you breathed
on your very first try,
like you’re filling you up
with an ample supply for goodbye...
Time is all we have.
I hope I have enough,
enough to show you love
before my time is up.
Before you wake the dead,
take a pause,
instead of deafening nonsense, share silence.
No violence today.
No violence,
no violence,
no violence today.
Like driving with the window down,
all of this will disappear.
I only have you now, you only have me here.
And we can’t count on tomorrow night,
or wait for brighter light.
I can hear you thru my eyelids,
chère Silence.
No violence today...
No violence,
no violence,
no violence today.
Well I hope, when you can't hear what I am thinking,
you know I can’t always talk
but I’m always listening
in an absence, where you hate to feel uncared for,
pretending there's nothing that you're not prepared for.
Who are you lapping when you’re running from surrender
if life is a fatal race for all contenders?
To find the peace within the combat where we’re standing,
we have to make our history less commanding.
Our mercy is a boundary we’ ll surrender
when love is a safer place we both remember,
like an old estate that stands in no location
at the edge of an age of endless renovation.
And while all that noise competes for our attention,
we’ ll meet on a quiet field in our own dimension.
We'll step inside a world far less demanding
when we allow for something less commanding...
When you lift me out of me
will I know when I’ve changed?
And when you bring me back to me,
will you bring me back to me, un-estranged?
Man, you're already home and you don't even know it.
You have a room you can return to and you'll never outgrow it.
See, you're already home when you don't know where to find it.
It's not our house that we remember,
it’s a feeling outside it,
when everyone's gone but we leave all the lights on anyway.
Right when the blizzard ends, they throw a fucking huge parade—
A great excuse for celebration of the mess they've made.
But then when the streets get flooded, we know what proximity’s worth,
‘cause we're already here, in the same place when our phones don't work.
So then we lie down in our field and just do nothing at all,
and I’m getting ready for when everything is wonderful
for just a couple pairs of broken bones with broken feathers in blood,
in a meadow, uncut and understood.
We can be an island apart from a ceaseless war on our heart,
harbored in a fortress insurmountable,
taller than affliction, safe wherever we are.
Erasing horror and disgust,
Rewinding the sorrow and the rust.
Before our suffering’s suffering,
hadn’t we suffered enough?
On the morning that we're both 19 and newly on our own
and all we know is “each other” and invisible homes,
we find two empty seats in the back of a car in an empty parking lot,
where all our bridges are abandoned and the cops have forgot
and I can feel the difference when the day begins,
like all I know is, "This year will be the year we win."
We smoke the paper from the banner from our past parades
and start again, before the memory of the mess we've made.