Isaac stomps out his cigarette ****,
He’s been living down in the suburban desert.
I heard he stopped going to church years ago
And I heard he’s scared to pray with both eyes shut.

A hot night - sixteen and itching with life,
Sixteen and running blind down the mountain
Sixteen with bound up wrists; ******* hands
And the story goes his old man dropped the knife.

And the story goes he put up a hell of a fight.
They’d make a killing on ticket sales alone.
Get that angel to sweat in the stadium lights.

And I heard that Isaac still has scars on his chest,
But we all pay some penance, we all cheat some test.

My mother and father, they brought me up clean
Spare change and a bible by the bedside
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

I watched the world through a hole in the screen
Smelled the rainstorm and the thunder outside
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

I hear my mother on my answering machine
She was a child when her own mother died
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

They told me that people are ugly and mean
And Jesus would love me if I swallowed my pride
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

My mother and father, they have a routine
And soft-spoken fears that they always denied
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

Childhood is a sickness without a vaccine
A fever dream, arms and eyes opened wide
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

Pale summer bodies
Hairless, like fish
***** for one another, lost in the blind sea.
They shed their virginities like dead skin,
They call out to me,
Winter is over!
Take off your wool coat.
But my mother told me not to and I’m afraid.
So I watch them come to shore
With childhood running down their legs,
And into the ground like melt-water

Summer is stale and lonely.
A fine dust caught in the air
And the corners of my mouth.
My eyelids are paper lanterns;
All I see is yellow.
And those chapped fields
That lay out under the high-noon sun,
They are stale and lonely too.
I want to peel off my skin;
It fits too tightly.
I want to raise my voice with the locusts,
Crying to our mother for rain
To dilute the earth.
But the sky is distant
An inverted ocean,
Refusing to fall.

Honey is the blood of the sweet and the rotten
With sugar-scabs on the back of their hands.

Their hands, stained to the wrists with pulp,
Waving to us from a roadside stand.
The people that live on this small mountain
Eat fallen fruit and peel off the flies.

His hands stick to the wheel as he drives,
Upriver, where the air is wet and heavy.
We swallow our words, thin like skim milk
And I smell the thunderstorm fresh on his clothes.

It covers the stench of his sweet rotting bones

Honey beads up in its combs
Honey combs his short summer hair
Honey runs thick in heat like this
Honey runs for miles on County Route Eight
Honey-bees cling to our window screens
Honey shut the screen-door when he smelled rain
Honeysuckles grew on the side of our road
Honey had a roadmap open on his knee
Honey-bees know when the summer is ending
Honey will wait out by the car for me