White English

(album: Mumps, Etc. - 2012)

Tongue gone dumb
From disuse at some
Numb young sea-scum's post
Bottle after bottle after bottle out sink
Cold filled to the cork with uncrackable code
So good through the years the knots went
That its alphabet was even forgotten
Me? I'm head vessel for a fleet of tears
Out on my old man's bones parole
Under sail only for a hole to hell to fill
With handfuls and handfuls of loose-earned dust
Or plug up level really with anything other than us
And then to toss a dusty rug over

Lost (lost lost) in translation. Lost

To a kingdom of light I wish tonight to fall witness
But victim to a spite it might incite sickness
I sit in and pretend and through it write hymns:
Tight-limbed in white English as my one and trite business
Light as a nice fat rice sack boiled in water
Out farther than the house of my father
Waiting in the sitting room of yet another doctor
I taste what little bitter roots this winter has to offer and
Without a son or daughter to shoulder the debt
Alone with the past and prone to regret
Dreamt my death by a knife on a path in Burnet
But under the bedspread, I'm younger than dead yet

Lost in translation. Lost

Even an opal heart hopes all night
In the bright, biting strobe lights
And bitter cold, as the living set up
To a long white joke told through sun up
'Til the bones and bodies spun around them fold
Hopes all night through the old lone fight
And the bright vast cold, but there's no punch-line
By this told whack joke for all one's life is surrounded
'Til the black hole and bodies spun around it fold