We all want to find some kind of purpose to our lives,
So we go on and we stick our tongues back down the throat of Babylon until we find a god to blame all of our problems on,
Some kind of ***** priest’s ears to scream our perverted thoughts into

Each night when we dance with the devil on his doorstep, we see our silhouettes flicker back and forth on his front door, cascaded by hellfire and the sins we seem to have talked ourselves out of

There’s a cool summer coming, I can feel it, the heat being scared away, running for some kind of cover, the same cover we keep praying to, keep singing to, keep wishing for,
And we write our wills to cater to whatever will profit us,
And we write our eulogies in braille because we know by the end of it all of our eyes will be burned down to piles of ash with no spirit left to rise out of,
No pair of glasses that aren’t broken

And we light candles and sprinkle holy water for séances,
I know there’s a way to bring back the dead, I’ve been doing it every single morning for twenty one years now

There’s no better feeling than hellfire, I tell you,
There’s no better feeling than hellfire

The hellfire our grandfathers and great grandfathers fought to step out of,
It’s all still alive and it’s all still breathing, right here in the pit of the void we’ve created over and over for ourselves

What a mess of hatred and bigotry we’ve stitched into our eyelids,
What a mess of brimstone, stacked on top of empty swimming pools and stuck to the feet of everyone in the choir,
Their lips still learning to stop the fire,
Their feet grown into the cracks of the sidewalks in Babylon

I’ve watched everything die without enough time to learn the language of the devil,
And because of this I will never know how to bargain with him,
And because of this there will never be enough soul in me to sell

There’s no better feeling than hellfire

I’ll write until I fall asleep,
Sleepy words under tongue and flicked from the tip, rolled off when needed,
Every car in my neighborhood has its lights on, and every neighbor does this on purpose so they’ll have an excuse to be able to bring something back from the dead every morning

Caffeine lungs, they’re so wired to crave exhaustion yet do not know how to get there,
I do not know how we got here, but I know we are going to fly into the evening sky to write love letters and put them inside of sunsets,
Evening commuters need something to keep their wheels moving on seemingly unmovable concrete

Endless loops of nicotine and Stevie Nicks’s voice could scream lullabies into the open mouths of yawns for hours and still never learn how to grow tired

Kerosene speed, call to the void, what a mess we’ve all made here

Learning to love yourself is like learning to put the fire out but keeping the matches in your pocket for when you need them again

If we were given the option to cut ourselves open and put back all of the guts we’ve spilled out for other people, I wonder how many of us would actually do it

How many of us must be content with waking up inside of someone else’s skin and claiming it to be our own

I never really learned how to sleep easily, for as long as I can remember I’ve been kept awake every night by whatever skeletons show up in my closet,
And that’s why I threw away my night light,
Smashed it

I was seven years old when I first saw the fire

I remember vividly hearing my mother’s preacher tell me that I should keep my heavens tilted towards the ceiling,
I knew then that church was no place for an honest and forgiving man

There will always be something that could fall through the floorboards at any minute

And when it all came crashing down I could feel my hair start to shed itself into shards of glass,
The pieces eclipsing mirrors through the smoke in my basement

The spark was born in flames and there is no doubt in my mind that it will go out the same way

I’ve gotten off to people telling me they’re in love with me and I became so obsessed with the feeling that I would grow my wings out and claim myself to be a guardian angel

And I am realizing now that there is no heaven in the ceiling and my guardian angels are nymphomaniacs only out to devour what little is left of me

I am the hummingbird now

I am the one with wings a million miles an hour and not enough nectar

I am too small to notice but when you do notice me I am the most beautiful thing you could ever see

However it is getting colder now,
Colder than it has ever been,
And my wings have forgotten how to move quicker than lightning,
And I will fall louder than thunder in this neighborhood,
I will die a martyr for your eyes and a sweet tooth for your candy

Salt shaker pepper jack dinner table,
I am a lonely man,
My family has since gone away but this house is still as full as ever,
I set the plates and silverware out with a candle for each

I have become my own apostle, disciple of my memory’s Christ, and when this dinner is over I will have realized that I was the one who betrayed myself

I still talk to the dead about them, and I am not scared of their reactions any longer

And when I ring the dinner bell, I will sit and eat and fellowship with everyone all at once

And we will break bread, like my wings when I am cold

And we will drink wine, red like nectar from the backyard

And when I finally go, there will be thunderstorms in this neighborhood

I will come back to you when I learn how to be alone

I will come back to you when I learn how to stop burying memories of other people inside of you

I will come back with a welcome mat and house warming gifts when I know that I can with confidence call you my home

I still tell my therapist about you every now and then,
Not so much about the trauma anymore,
More so when I’ve cried deep enough to reach the happy thoughts again

When she asks me how I feel about all of it,
I can’t help but think of how many times I kissed you in a row on our first date, or how I fell madly in love with you when you first opened your mouth towards me

I knew trouble was coming, and I knew you were the ticket, but *******, it had been a while since I had used someone as a coffin for my own heartbroken feelings

Your eyes were the perfect kind, the ones such a deep blue that I could feel my phobia of the ocean every time I looked into them

Maybe I was never really looking for a home

Just looking for a place to face my fears

He walks in the front door with a 30 pack of pbr and a whole lotta love,
And when his friends all go to open their first one,
They make a toast and pledge that this’ll be their year

But fall never came here,
It’s been so hot all year,
And the winter came without warning,
Leaving us cold and lonely,
With no room left to feel

My garden is frozen over,
I wish my hair was full of four leaf clovers,
Because I’m scared I’ll never feel lucky enough,
I wanna pull my hair out until until I’m bald and I wanna use my head to grow roses but there will never be enough blood in the soil because I’m too busy reopening the scars,
So the roses will be wilted

Enough is never enough until enough is enough

And

Love only means convenience until love isn’t convenient anymore

And

I wanna **** until I don’t give a **** anymore,
but we’ve all tried that and all that does is leave us alone and in the dark

Wash clean your black eyes

Scrub away everything that makes you hurt

Rub your skin with bars of soap until all you see is bones

Find someone and sit on their bed while they explain how everything in their room became everything that they consider to be home

The hardest part was realizing that we didn’t need others to chase away our loneliness

We just needed to find a way to talk to it

I’ve spent the last 21 years of my life recording my eulogy into blank CDs,
and when my funeral becomes sold out, throw all of the money into my casket so I’ll have bus fare to make it back from hell,
And maybe put the pastors microphone next to my mouth at the viewing, just so I can get the last word in, I’ve always been that way

Project your favorite memories of us onto my body, just so I can feel something before you leave,
It’s a cold and lonely bed tonight, but someone told me to leave the windows cracked,
Someone told me to leave the blinds all drawn, We don’t want to see out and they don’t want to see in,
But that doesn’t make a difference where we’re going

All we have are these words, so let’s make them *****, pretty, broken, beautiful,
All we have is each other, so let’s kiss like we’ve never felt lips on our lips before,
Move your fingers down my neck like you’re playing a guitar and make my mouth sing out the chords you never learned

Yeah, I could say I’m pretty lost right now,
I couldn’t tell you on a map where my heart is anymore, it’s kind of all over the place,
Hopefully most of it is in the Ohio river where I left it, right under the bridge,
Next to hundreds of butts of cigarettes and the tears I cried out at 18, we were all so young once, I’ll never understand what happened

In my dreams, I crash my car every night,
Just to see what it would really feel like to fly out of here,
I’m not quite dead yet, but I swear when I wake up in the mornings, I can feel the wings on my back

And every night when we fall sleep, I become tangled in her hair, and when we perform the death dance, I am like Jesus in a temple, and we are silent as sleep,
I promised her I would kiss her bones until they were no longer broken,
I would teach my brain to move like a puppet, without strings attached

I will continue to hurt until I can no longer mend,
And I will continue to ignore God’s voicemails until my inbox is full,
And I will live like this until I no longer can