1. |
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Feelin’ like the color of Monday
Like a deer on the side of the highway
Like a love letter, returned to sender
A phone number you can’t remember
Oh Lord, what do you know?
Is it too late to save my soul?
Show me a sign, throw me a bone
Oh Lord, what do you know?
Feelin’ like a penny on a railroad track
Like a runaway train that ain’t
ever coming back
Like a prayer unanswered, a song unsung
A foreign language spoken by no one
Like a 58’er in a Soviet Gulag
Penning a posthumous epilogue
Like the tears of the Komsomol girl
Lost in a collective world
Like a Patriarch Ponds decapitation
Like a stray dog strapped in a spaceship
With nowhere to run, nowhere to go
Oh Lord, what do you know?
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2. |
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Listening to Coast to Coast
On a late night drive through Ohio
Wondering what the government knows
About crash-landed UFOs
My eyes gazed for an unknown distance
Commiserating human existence
Am I the only pebble on the beach
The undertow is dragging out to sea?
Oh, and flies smash
Into the grill of my subcompact
From Bowling Green to the edge of the world
We are not alone, except when we’re alone
Driving through the night
And then static overthrows the station
It’s a total loss of communication
May the chemistry of stars guide me home
Back to my ancestral unknown
I imagine conversation passing a cemetery
“As you are now, so once were we”
Life’s a Joycean sentence
The pub clock is five minutes fast
One day life is gonna close my tab
On everything I never got to see
Driving through the night
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3. |
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Mr. Ramirez was older than time
Half drunk, half blind
I used to help him around
the house sometimes
He paid me in quarters, nickels, and dimes
We were neighbors in a past life
We were closer than I realized
911, I dialed the call
You were the first dead body I ever saw
I knocked forever on your front door,
Then used the key under the mat
My intuition had a premonition
Calling your name, you didn’t call back
Should’ve prepared going up the stairs
For what I’d find behind your door
You lying in bed with your eyes open
You were the first dead body I ever saw
Then I collapsed against the wall
I couldn’t breathe
I was just a kid, barely 13
I saw how it ends, life’s fatal flaw
You were the first dead body I ever saw
On your porch, I waited and wept
Unsure of what comes next
The coroner came, Mom called me home
No one ever laid a tombstone
It still haunts the house of my mind
Even after all this time
You lying in bed with your eyes open
You were the first dead body I ever saw
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4. |
No Peace of Mind to Rest
04:17
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Panic divides petrified minds
As I stare through the slotted blinds
Between finger and thumb,
I search for someone
‘Cause I heard a noise in the night
Was it leaves in the breeze
Or crucified thieves
Or was it the secret police?
Who’s trying to mess with me?
A weary world leans on its crutch
Walking down Main Street all boarded up
Line up for liquor, need to feel numb
Woke up this morning wanting to buy a gun
Something small and discreet,
Something I can tuck in my jeans
When I go out in the streets
The finite future is choosing the losers
So who is it gonna be? You or me?
I got no peace of mind to rest
Breaking bread with your empty chair
My superstitious side is saying prayers
Oh, depression’s a deadly weapon
I wish I could believe in the clouds of heaven
‘Cause then I’d know you’re okay
And I’d no longer have to worry
If the ground is cold at night
Or if the grave digger left on a light
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5. |
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I know my way to your new place
From the cemetery gates
Like the back of my hand
Knows the distance to my heartbreak
I park the car and I greet your new neighbors
I read their epitaphs, I call in favors
I brought some flowers and a six-pack of beer
Hope you don’t mind if I just
talk, drink, and sit here
Feels like there’s so much that I can tell ya
How the world keeps spinning
with or without ya
Your New York Mets are a tragedy
It was a total shutout at the Subway Series
I watched with Mom in the nursing home
Told her I’ve been sitting here
Talking to your tombstone
Well, I’ve been looking for a job
but they’re hard to find
When you’ve never been the people type
But now I’m desperate and
my money’s getting tight
Most nights it gets so damn
dark in my mind
But today I went up to the
Post Office in town
Where me and the mailman chatted in fiction
Like, “What would you do
with a million dollars?
What car would you drive?
Where would you live?”
Told him I’d move back to
Marine Park, Brooklyn
Buy back that little home that
we were raised in
Just to listen to those old walls talk
Of you and Mom with heavy
New York accents
I try my best to not get sad
Think of all the good times that
made us laugh
It’s getting late, I should be getting home
It’s been nice sitting here
Talking to your tombstone
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6. |
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Lately my life feels just like
The eve of a Spanish bullfight
Where the Toro Bravo will die tomorrow
And the matador will feel no sorrow
Lately I’ve been feeling like
The slayer and the slain
Don’t go throwing roses in my grave
Lately my life feels just like
I’ve blown it up with dynamite
A quarter stick inside my fist
I held it and I lit the wick
I tried to blow it out, but couldn’t
Now everything has changed
Don’t go throwing roses in my grave
Oh no, save ‘em for another lover
That you wish to lie with
Put ‘em in a pretty vase
With every petal on display
This world I love, but cannot stay
Its rules I didn’t make
So don’t go throwing roses in my grave
Lately my life feels just like
A lost-in-orbit satellite
Once had a purpose, but now it’s worthless
Doomed to float around Earth’s surface
And look on down through all the clouds
While civilizations wave
Don’t go throwing roses in my grave
Oh, no! ‘Cause I made a deal with the devil
I wore a wire, I gave him names
Now that we’re gathered here together,
Don’t go throwing roses in my grave
Don’t go throwing roses
Lately my life feels just like
A run-on sentence
Run away, run away, run away
And don’t go throwing roses in my grave
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7. |
Hurry Me Down to Hades
04:12
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I was checking in at the night window
I was buzzing the bell at purgatory’s hotel
But alas, no vacancy
Hurry, hurry, hurry me down to Hades
A lotus eater, bound by bliss
I sank deeper and deeper into the abyss
I got so close almost could see
Hurry, hurry, hurry me down to Hades
A line of cars pulled over to the shoulder
Letting my ambulance drive by
These paramedics will never take me alive
Hurry, hurry, hurry me down to Hades
And as my life flashed before my eyes
They shocked me once, then they shocked me twice
With my last breath I gasped and screamed
Hurry, hurry, hurry me down to Hades
Hurry me down
I’ve spent my whole life just waiting around
I’ll never get a halo, never get a crown
So hurry me down
Heaven forbid I wake up tomorrow
With soul trapped in bone and skin
I’m banging on the door, devil let me in
Hurry, hurry, hurry me down to Hades
And I don’t mind sharing a room
With a cannibal at The Crossed Harpoons
Odysseus’s ship is just passing through
Hurry, hurry, hurry me down to Hades
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8. |
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Oh, my soul is swooning slowly
To the tempo of you only
So I’m gonna write an
anthem for the one I love
It’ll get ‘em up out of the seats
And onto the dance floor
A special kind of song
That you save for the encore
It’s gonna be a cruel emotion
For the lonely kind
That like to tear their hearts out
With their own knives
It’s gonna make you know
The way I feel inside
Somewhere in a foreign land
They’ll decipher the words
Of our love language put into verse
They’ll play it on a dive bar jukebox
And when it comes on
All of the drunks will be arm in arm
Even the bartenders will hum along
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9. |
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Your heart’s been beating through your chest
In a war your body hasn’t declared yet
It’s been in conflict a long time
We just don’t call it what it is
You dyed your hair and you slicked it back
Always trying to get yourself
back on the right track
Moving every couple years
To a new city, a new state
But you always find your way back here
Between a rock and a hard place
Sunday dinner at your parents’ house
You were all hyped up on some
unknown kind of speed
Your father gave his old lecture
You fought defensively
You ran out of patience and
you asked me for a ride
Grabbed a duffle bag and
raced off into the night
Sayin’, “This time it’s gonna
be different, man
I got connections up in Michigan
I just gotta find a way outta here
before shit gets weird”
At a Greyhound Station
Waiting on a way out of town
Desperation knows no bounds
On the drive out you were silent
You drank a tall boy from a brown paper bag
We listened to the game on the radio
And stared endlessly out the window
We weren’t bound by surname or blood
But life found a way of making
brothers out of us
“Thanks for the ride, see you soon my friend”
Yeah, that was the last I ever heard from him
And then I watched you disappear
In a rearview mirror
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10. |
Guest In Your House
04:55
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Hung up on wood-paneled walls
Were pictures of the family taken at the mall
And a crucifix and some wedding photos
Outside the window, a view of The Poconos
When I was a guest in your house
Oh, we never took sides,
we loved them the same
After Mom and Dad went their separate ways
Now we’re living here, but it’s only temporary
In this small guest bedroom
that we’re all sharing
When I was a guest in your house
Where The Price is Right was on the TV
Grandma’s in the kitchen cleaning
My grandfather straightens his tie
Mama’s working late tonight
Bobby’s in the bedroom sleeping
I’m in the living room kneeling
In front of the TV with Bob Barker
on the screen
When I was a guest in your house
Me and Great Uncle Billy in his old age
Were watching black and white
movies with John Wayne
Between his fingers, always a cigarette
We passed the time with paint by number sets
When I was a guest in your house
But then one day he passed away, I was told
The funeral, I wasn’t old enough to go
But every time I drive down our old road
I swear to God I am 10 years old
He’s puffing on a pack of Marlboros
Dialing in that old time radio
Sayin’, “Boys, they don’t sing it
like they used to!”
Then I try to impersonate Elvis
When I was a guest in your house
Where the nighttime news was on the TV
We’re waiting on the lottery
My grandfather clenches his ticket
Says, “Maybe tonight we’ll win it”
Grandma’s sippin’ scotch and soda
Sayin’, “Boys, don’t get your hopes up”
But we’ll never quit dreaming big
No matter how damn foolish
When I was a guest in your house
Just hoping things would work out
When I was a guest in your house
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Gregor Barnett Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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