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John Darnielle Dec 2020
I'm going to do what I like
I'm going to live how I want
I'm going to build myself a great estate
With lots of statues out front

Choirs from the Curtis Institute
Singing me to sleep
Wake up and worship the great gold sheep

I'm going to walk the pathways of the ancients
I'm going to let my name be known
I'm going to seek the wild haunts of this world
And carve a place out all my own

Heat up the iron until it glows
Burn the brand so deep
Wake up and worship the great gold sheep

There's only one, splendid and fine
The ages attest it's wondrous design
You and me stand somehow above the fray
And name everyone who's throwing their chance away

I'm going to write my name on everything
I'm going to leave a lasting legacy
And when my body's thrown with great force from a window
The dogs will fight for whatever's left of me

Shallow grave among the weeds
Where the pale worms creep
Wake up and worship the great gold sheep
John Darnielle Dec 2020
Toward the tail-end of the age that's almost finished
Where the highway starts to crack and nobody fixes it
I was wandering through an undeveloped tract
Out near the ocean
One-hundred acres, we will build to suit
See what there is to see before it's gone
Somebody's always just about to put some kind of awful plan in motion

Eastern red cedars,
and the pines
And suddenly an elevated stone slab
in what must have been a clearing once
Try to recognize the signals and the signposts
My curiosity
Will likely always get the best of me

It's like that one thing
My Dad kept trying to tell me
As the twilight
Inched its way on up his body
Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!

Well of course I climbed atop the slab and I lay down on it
I am a child
I had my face toward the sky lying there in the sun with both my eyes closed
Woke up in near darkness
What the hell is wrong with me
Volunteer pines in the hundreds in the dusk like military tent poles

Let my eyes adjust
Try to read the markings on the slab
Weird alphabets I felt sure I hadn't seen just before I passed out
Stars growing brighter
Me looking up
Like a lobster in a cage down in the depths beneath the bottom of a glass boat

And I heard a voice
From somewhere out beyond the free fall
Like a captive soldier
He's just trying to warn his brothers
Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!

— The End —