The Crest

(album: The Early Whitney - 2003)

Every little renaissance is echoed in the colosseum
Empty off the walls of Tin Pan Alley (alley)
Til the space between the skin and shirt grows thin
Til the cells of flesh and material
Are indistinguishable under a microscope
Til all the water goes gas and the potholes pop
After the day's gone dark
And the next chord's struck out of necessity (necessi-necessities, necessi-necessities)
And they peel the paper from the walls
Or pick another color paint
And the next chord echoes like shrinking nickels
In a metal elevator falling single file size order
Through the hole in your pocket landing round
A silhouette of the threat of silence
The lifespan of the flight path of a slowly sinking skipping stone
The dying light of the law's dying bells
The timespan between wave crests is what makes the crest the crest
(What)
I know the temptation to straighten the spines
Of men hunched from years of keeping nickels in their shirt pockets
To lift these wood men from the pines
And, in one jerk, snap every bone, disk, and plate in place
Like adjusting some rusty segmented piece of an erector set from the 1950s
But the human spine is an iron rod
And, when bent, needs time and heat to make straight
And it's easier to fill front pockets with nickels
Than it is to make a cold metal supple
The lifespan of the flight path of a slowly sinking skipping stone
The dying light of the law's dying bells
The timespan between wave crests is what makes the crest the crest