Hanging out in the trees
A wreckage as far as the eye can see
The leaves at the bottom look lonely
If only you were there

Strings and boxes make up for the losses
That I feel for you
And I fear if I told you
You'd only grow colder
And move hundreds of miles from here

You play in the smoke in silence till I spoke
And you poked your way through
To something beating hard
I've only got eyes for you


But the wreckage is beginning to fail
Falling through the branches
The engine, still ignited
Began to spark a light
And you could see my ***** face
Through the old, scratchy pine
And I looked into your coal black eyes
And prayed that you were mine

From 9 to 5 you visited me
My limbs still twisted and bruised
Hanging up in the tree
A personal scarecrow for you
And one day I tried to climb up
To wipe the dirt away
But you slipped and fell
I screamed like hell
And forced myself free

Out of the wreckage I rose
The ground came closer and closer
I went to touch your lifeless face
But my shaking hands just froze
I wish I could have caught you
And now you are the wreckage too

So I climbed back into the tree
And burrowed there for three hundred years
Staring down at you wither away
And as soon as my mouth could no longer speak
I did what I've dreamt of most
I fell like you, through the branches too

Graceful, Beautiful, True

You've got me
going to the river to pray
gotta wash these sins away
but ain't no water gonna wash your hands off me

Yeah, you've got me
down on my knees
begging, begging, begging please
for mercy
take your hands off me

And they can call me a sinner
I've only got one heart
and you ate my soul for dinner
devoured me from the start

Yes, I'm going down
down to the river to pray
but no water gonna take this hold off me

Oh you've got me down on my knees
begging, begging, begging please
someone help me
get your devil out of me

I hear the willows whispering
telling lies all in the wind
and I'm drifting with the current
just let the water take me in

Because this desire
ain't no fire
on my funeral pyre
ain't no water gonna take your hands off me

How do you pretend to say I love you?
How do you pretend to care at all?
To muster that much emotion must surely take its toll
On the body you inhabit
So cold and so precisely
Nicely
Packaged into a mirage of caring

Daring me to challenge each syllable of the words you mimic
Parroting Hallmark cards with heady persistence
I've built up resistance to the lies that sit and rise
Like smoke from the fires you light
On your way out the door

Warning all those who come after
The story is always the same
She loves you so much
"So, so much"
So much that she just can't stay.

He watched her grow out her fingernails
Burn herself with cigarettes
Her scabs would heal and morph into gray dots on her dark flesh
She looked like a winter afternoon with a chance of showers

She was beautiful in her own way
The way books are beautiful stacked on shelves
The way trees can only be appreciated in forests
Her beauty was of many and of one.

When the darkness can have a name
when it can make shapes that look like the people you've forgotten
when it wraps a sense of warm isolation
and burns the feeling of loneliness in your skull
leaving raw, fleshy guilt
you can't hide from it
you must let it blacken your bones and sink into your pores
and rip through you from the inside
bleeding you out until your are a pile of consciousness
and only then can you forgive yourself
and the faces become a smudge in your memory once again
sitting on the shelves of your mind, hidden behind velvet curtains
waiting for the darkness to come again

I lay dejected amongst the rubble of the wreckage
******* with ribbons
my body draped like wet sheets off the branches of a sturdy old pine
It appeared I was going mad as I sat alone
My blood curdled and turned into sludge and my breath began to quiet

I am the wreckage of this world
perhaps too dedicated to being alive
that I am hung up like an ornament
a tribute to the ****** and the lonely

I hope to meet the cold face of my shadow shortly
imagining my welcome home into the earth
melting into the molten lava
laying sweetly with the dinosaurs
a new fossil for the ages