Now Only

(album: Now Only - 2018)

I remember looking around a hospital waiting room
Full of people all absorbed in their own personal catastrophes
All reading books like Being Mortal, all with a look in their eyes
And I remember still feeling like, "No, no one can understand"
"No, my devastation is unique"

But people get cancer and die
People get hit by trucks and die
People just living their lives
Get erased for no reason
With the rest of us watching from the side

And some people have to survive
And find a way to feel lucky to still be alive
To sleep through the night

I wrote down all the details of how my house fell apart
How the person I loved got killed by a bad disease
Out of nowhere for no reason and me living in the blast zone
With our daughter and etcetera
I made these songs
And the next thing I knew I was standing in the dirt
Under the desert sky at night outside Phoenix
At a music festival that had paid to fly me in
To play these death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs
Standing in the dust next to an idling bus
With Skrillex inside and the sound of subwoofers in the distance
I had stayed up til three
Talking to Weyes Blood and Father John Misty
About songwriting in the backstage bungalows
Eating fruit and jumping on the bed like lost children
Exploding across the earth in a self-indulgent all-consuming
Wreck of ideas that blot out the stars
To be still alive felt so absurd

People get cancer and die
People get hit by trucks and die
People just living their lives get erased for no reason
With the rest of us averting our eyes

When I was leaning on Skrillex's tour bus waiting for the hotel shuttle in the middle of the night
I barely knew who I was
I looked up and saw Orion wielding a club and a shield
And there you were again:
Majestic dead wife
As my grief becomes calcified, frozen in stories
And in these songs I keep singing, numbing it down
The unsingable real memories of you
And the feral eruptions of sobbing

These waves hit less frequently
They thin and then they are gone
You are gone and then your echo is gone
And then the crying is gone
And what is left but this merchandise?

This is what my life feels like now
Like I got abruptly dropped off by the side of the road
In the middle of a long horrible ride
In a hot van that was too full of confident chattering dudes
And the sound of tires receding
Taking in the night air I say
"Now only"