Nonkilling 6 | Hunger

(album: The Anteroom - 2018)

Winter raging
The color gone
Hands were blue and cold
A recitation
I slowly read you Tomb for Anatole

He was eight years old
A dead child is no
Occasion for a song
Where did I go wrong?

When they say face facts, disobey that
There's singing still left to be done
They still can't name that fragrant
Wind rolling off a corpse

Until the day that you play back the tape that you made
Record your mother saying every word
Pronounce the gray that the rains had brought over the sun
Like a veil to suffocate the earth
(But hunger is first)

And I could feel in my body time rushing in
The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin
The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong
Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum

I remember snow
Saw it fall
Watched a child learn
The word 'nightfall'
And sleep because it's sad
Or not sleep at all
I learned the word 'forever'
From Demerol
I let my body go
I feed the thaw
Like jumping off a cliff
But never falling
A dust finer than smoke
A memory in my throat
A flame that pulses cold
A faraway echo

And I could feel in my body time rushing in
The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin
The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong
Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum

And I could feel in my body time rushing in
The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin
The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong
Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum

I remember snow
Saw it fall
Watched a child learn
The word 'nightfall'
And sleep because it's sad
Or not sleep at all
I learned the word 'forever'
From Demerol
I let my body go
I feed the thaw