1. |
Black Lodge (water)
05:19
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Beryl smudge of spruce
The guardrail grin of West Virginia
Hex of a fog on Davis lawns
Like a blossom, you collapsed in on yourself
But what is the death of the body to a God without one?
Forgiving your hippie daughters
(there are pictures of you in uniform)
Reciting components of engine parts
Or singing “Kaw-liga” on the front porch
And Robert’s mowed the lawn
“Like shit he did,” says Dora in a rage
And Jacob and I build our lexicon
Two young brother bears
Bound to freeze in Christmas trees as one
Running it off into coal country
Weekender at Blackwater
Mother is somber on the phone
My cousin tells me how she saw Jesus
And now how he won’t leave her alone
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2. |
Arrowheads or Worse
05:18
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New aura of sonic flora
And that corrected set of gap teeth
That allow me to sing less dissonantly
And I would swallow arrowheads or worse
To demonstrate my empathy for how it must have felt for you
To watch me at the altar once again
Repeating vows through slanted mouths
As all my life, I’ve alchemized your grief
Ephemera of desert light!
I was grown when I was five
Blooming in unqualified defiance of my youth
Like seven times of seventy
The chariots are deafening
And swinging low as I am thumbing rides
To take the fire I have been prescribed
The spiders are in the fallow
My mother’s listless
But child me, with sugar cereal, ignores her warnings
Why couldn’t we with ink the oceans fill?
The sun rescinds its offer of celestial hallucination
And we (the prone to melancholy)
Will hear the rooster crow and we will know exactly how we’ve made you feel
Ephemera of desert light!
I was grown when I was five
Blooming in unqualified defiance of my youth
Like seven times of seventy
The chariots are deafening
And swinging low as I am thumbing rides
You are where I will go when I die
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3. |
Bright deceiver!
06:38
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Bright deceiver, O believer, coming in a cowl to kill and rob
This territory is the glory of our long awaited Son of God
You have no power here on this, our blue-green sphere
Go back beneath, where you belong
All of your dogs are dead and gone
We are raising their replacements here
Trans-Pacific metaphysics, conjuring a city from the reef
With all satanic in a panic, eulogizing sets of gnashing teeth
We’re planting sovereign flags on Pacific gyre flats
Picking through the trash
Making love inside thrash far off the tealer coasts of Thailand
Made up with the opal black of iridescent pen shells:
Your sweet seagull bride!
All in favor, sign the paper
Show your neighbors where you’ve kept your guns
Lay them out and melt them down to farming implements to feed your sons
And no less! Your daughters
Turning saline waters into wedding banquet wine
To stain the beard of braided brine that you will wear to wintertime
A reincarnate Noah tribe on Ararat arrived!
Fruitful! Multiplied!
Indigo and orchid white
And shined up in a gown like a thundercloud
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4. |
Econoline
04:21
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Bravery at Backbone
Drawing x’s on our hands, dreaming of big summer tour plans
History of Monsters
With their hooks deep in a scene, acting like we weren’t all 16
And we’d take the Econoline your dad provided
Provided we make sure to bring it back full
And be respectful
And all those things our fathers say
And at some Catholic church
There was glory in our sweat for that fifteen minute set
Opening for Oceana
You tried to talk me off the ledge of going off to college
And you’d make it another few months
I promised you once that I was sure that Indy wouldn’t take
But the shows in Delray are the ones I still play back when someone shouts a breakdown call
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5. |
Bliss Is a Flak Jacket
03:54
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Hands done up in rose gold
You were a vision with a baby on your hip
And prone to meddle with crystals
As though you missed all other spiritual conduits
And as I’m hacking at a novel somewhere
Trying to comb the sparrows out of my hair
I’m thinking back about the time you read my palm;
And God, I hope you did it wrong
Bliss? Bliss is a flak jacket
Guilt is the shrapnel/coat rack I’ve since sought to expel
But I fear it’s clear that I’m not a shaman
So I’ll keep my “cosmic revelations” to myself
I watched a revolution choke and sputter
I saw depression try to kill my brother
I heard Leviathan was living in a lake up near the border states
And back, back off the back porch
There was a demon in the bonfire we made
So we formed an assembly line
To cart back buckets we had summoned from the lake
And even when all of the kindling had flattened
We were never certain anything happened
Besides the vestiges of smoke getting in my shirt
And smelling of the earth
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6. |
Ascension
06:33
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I was in your bedroom
I knew you planned to leave soon
With your legs like javelins
And your ribcage rattlin’
The making of arrangements
The stripping down naked
To administer the sacrament
Your last will and testament
When I see the silver ring I wear
I’m reminded of my family singing hymns around your bed
Sometimes, “It is well with my soul” is a damn lie
Is history a mantra?
I never knew my grandpa
And my dear old dad has mileage
Will my children have the privilege?
When I see the silver in his hair
I’m reminded of my family singing hymns in the church where I grew up
When it was well with my soul
I’m told that when my grandfather died
He sat up in his bed and said, “O! I see a light!
It’s beautiful!”
But I am less certain of my corpse
Will you have to break me like a horse?
Will you have to break me, like a horse?
Can I just take you at your word, or will you have to break me?
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7. |
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I was workin’ for the county when I saw her standing there
With a ribcage like a washboard and with briars in her hair
Alabama is a furnace and the summer is a dog
And she was naked in the creek bed in the image of her god
On the Dia de los Muertos, I was sitting in a bar
With tequila as my mistress, when my thoughts all turned to dark
So I gave up heavy drinking and stitched up my broken mouth
And I felt that old conviction, so I started driving south
In the clay of Mason-Dixon, in the absence of all snow
Where the button buck is rutting for the white tail of the doe
She is toddling in the tall grass, just as timeless as the trees
Just as grungy as Seattle, just as holy as a priest
I was climbin’ up to Babel, she was tugging at my jeans
Said, “You can’t ever get to heaven if you don’t know what heaven means!”
“It’s not peeling like a paint job, it’s not brushed under the rug
No, it’s much deeper beneath the floorboards, in these trenches that we’ve dug.”
With a prismatic halo and emaciated legs
She took all my constitution and faded back into the dregs
And as the sun set on the trailers of my past and future lives
The magnolias are pregnant! The cicadas harmonize!
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8. |
Supercareful
04:17
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Cull the unwashed spirits in your skull
Come and watch some basketball with me
The quarter’s almost through!
Soon, the reservoir azaleas’ bloom
Will break this catatonic fugue if we are supercareful
You, as diaphanous as dew
Crucifix in the rear-view, honest and ethereal
Stay! And when the rain lets up, we’ll skate
And I can show you 808s and talk of evolution
I dug the retro diner coffee mug
Though the grounds collect like mud on ceramic seafloor
And ate the holy breakfast that you made
And watched you do your hair in braids, ever super careful
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9. |
Mandala in Reverse
06:22
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Well I’ve been down on the lathe
I carved myself in frame
And I memorized clever things to say from a tarot deck
And your reading list
I was so impressed
And I asked about your cats
As I’m enraptured by your cheekbones
And the way you are so self-possessed
I’m no good at this
But in your sanskrit eyes
I am wrapped in white
And laid in the earth
With a rosary in my hands
What are these yokes even worth if I’m shouldering my half with a ghost?
Well, I am a crow in mourning:
Broke down, stiff, and taking the winter drugs I take to not hate myself
It isn’t going well
But you? You’re something else
You are sand in my fist
You are snow in my mouth
But religion’s a bitch and my mother prays with instant results
I don’t want to wake the neighbors through these thin walls
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10. |
'59 Tomahawk
06:47
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The way that “Montauk” feels in your mouth
To conjure white sands and moto jeans
As though we all somehow got greyer-eyed on Halloween
The all-white quiet of Meadowlark Woods
Split clean open by Mossberg report
And the downy barn owls, palmetto vexed, become a sport
Lavender in a wreath around your head
Safely hidden in the monolith
Sacred horror sleeps it off in fits
There are islands of lucidity
But we’ve been proven irresponsible
And I am hardly jettisoning gold with no excuse
Lavender in a wreath around your head
Safely hidden in the monolith
Sacred horror sleeps it off in fits
Twisting slowly from the black lagoon
Smoking flower in an azure plume
Having finally found our quiet room
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11. |
chakra #6
05:38
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In your screaming ultraviolet brain
The messenger of the bad moon comes down
Says, “Little babe, you’re in retrograde!
What happened to you? When did you get so old?”
In your young bride’s face, you memorize her soul like no one should have to
While you know it starts snowing soon
And the Series is won
But you won’t see the score
Twisted up like wraiths in the throat of the morning
The redolence of gloom in unfamiliar rooms
My brother rests off the factory line
In the pre-dawn fires of middle age
Rituals of solipsistic doom/
I wish I were a faith healer
Blisteringly paced, without any warning
Astral tripping slow/
I wonder if you know:
Do vultures sing?
What color is God?
I’ve forgotten
But brother, rest your blood
Your wars are won
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Joshua Powell Indianapolis, Indiana
Joshua Powell is the exhausted wizard at the helm of IN's most haunted rock band. From his hardcore roots in the Floridian swamps and beyond the fever dream of his folk era, his literary lyrics dig for enlightenment in a surrealist muck. “Four LP's and over 900 shows later, the midwestern road dog's ever- evolving, transcendent style embraces hallucinatory metal and grimy psychedelia.” -Audiotree ... more
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