Pizza Alley

(album: Spirit World Field Guide - 2020)

Keep it classy
Key to Pizza Alley
Weaving traffic in a overheating taxi
In Lima
Tickets to liberate the center, pitch surrender
To a witch doctor pouring amphibians out the blender
Underneath a glowing purple Christ
Perfect surf, curl up and die
Cobblestone alone a masterclass in open world design
I came from the wasteland in featherlight trail pants
Fugee off the ant trail
Inca trail mailman
Fail in every hemisphere
Show me the ambrosia
Maybe ghost into the coca leaf and holy heliconia
Where shaman opt to zombify undocumented expats
High and writing Ayahuasca letters back to Melmac
Dear friends
Send help yesterday
Yours true, condor, puma, serpiente
Talk rap albums over alpaca medallions
With metalheads who traffic magic flowers from the mountains
To the houses of the holy
A token of that sacred valley balance
So you don't expel omega fatty acids
The strays in the plaza look happier than my neighbors
They answer to Paddington Bear in waders
It's amazers
What ship, what shore?
I grew up writing riddles under bridges in New York
Now I travel like a highwayman who whispers to his horse
Sharing stories out of winter, trying to trigger something pure
From "Dying on the vine," to, "It's alive and indivisible"
To, "How'd I get this far without a bindle full of crystal skulls?"
Cozy local woven goods
Beaded shit for people you have never met or spoken to
But know they'll need to hold Peru
Throw a couple logs on the fire
There's a chimney in San Blas where you can hear Baby Dayliner
Bouncing softly off the navy blue
April showers, paper moon
Run the light and beat the drum
And smoke the dope and raid the tomb

Pay no mind to the bygones
Find him a strange hill to die on
Never let me die on a regular hill
Never let me die on a regular hill
Pay no mind to the bygones
Find him a strange hill to die on
Never let me die on a regular hill
Never let me die on a regular hill
Never let me die on a regular hill
Never let me die on a regular hill
Never let me die on a regular hill
Never let me die on a regular hill

The local homie blow smoke on his wounds
And talk about the jungle like it's always in the room
New and shooting lumens out of a canoe into the ruins
Silly putty for some otherworldly woo-woo to influence
Ooh, it's a strange bouquet
Not today, Supay
Rubber boots and tumbo juice and tarantula toupee
Canopy going H.A.M. over camp in a feuding biome
Os Mutantes row-row-rowing the wrong way into the diode
Fry the banana, heart of palm ribbons
Fish from the river, sauces made of citrus
On a screen porch pimpled after dark with frogs and lizards
When high as hell, they might as well be Mothras and Godzillas
It's awesome
Peer into the spirit quest, spellbound
Three to one machete, yelling back into the hellmouth
You hit the labyrinth an ambassador of peace and love
You might return with the root of your superego plunged

The river boils when it sees me
The river boils when it sees me
The river boils when it sees me
The river boils when it sees me

"Electric eels killed two of my best friends"
Said the local to the gringo
Then dove in off the pirogue
In a cloud of smoky mopacho
They boat in from Iquitos
Mosquitos on the wall of the Amazonian ethos
Off to bounce a light off any hairy eyeball in the basin
Wild pig, owl, baby caiman
Coral snakes that drape down from the timbers
Like the six fingers of Satan
They only speak in S's, you cannot get an amen
I told my darkest secrets to a pair of fuchsia dolphins
The doozy out in Paris, the futures I had squandered
They whispered something to me I will bear unto my coffin
What's apparent via Occam is despondency as common
We traded numbers and made off into the pond scum
Humming Muddy Waters
Motherfucker, I am on one
Earth, wind, fire, and papaya
We fly with the poison arrow
We dive with the arapaima
Look

The river boils when it sees me
The river boils when it sees me
The river boils when it sees me
The river boils when it sees me

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid on the spirit, aching for the light
And when embracing the horizon, it pours on us a black day which is sadder than any night