1. |
Grace Period
03:27
|
|||
|
Mid-October ’97,
I was high on mescaline,
half-naked in the attic,
drilling script into your wrist:
“Made through my will,
through to the end.”
New Years Day, ’99,
he’s pounding on the door again,
and for a moment I thought I saw you levitate,
but he just had you by the neck.
I feel my spit coat the barrel,
someone’s fist in my jacket,
and I taste copper as I black out.
June 2001,
half a body in the backyard,
rabbit’s foot on your necklace
as the cops park across the street.
We steal ourselves under the eave
and we escape.
The heat dragged the scent from the soil,
and within days there was a call,
but it was the third one that made them listen.
New flowers marked the place to dig.
Look down at your arm
and repeat it back to me:
“Made through my will,
through to the end.”
|
||||
2. |
||||
|
Any time that you’d like to
you can will yourself to be erased.
Release yourself into the stillness
and disassociate.
We get together here and try it all the time
and on clear nights some of us wake up
in a place warm and formless,
where all creation reaches up to receive you,
and some of us don’t ever come back.
We’re all excited to put a face to your voice, at last.
I know who you are the moment you step off the train,
chin buried in your coat,
eyes trained down toward the platform.
You raise your head to meet the gaze of every face you’ve ever seen,
and all tension drains from an invisible center.
You start to go shapeless in the car,
so we take the highway.
It’s like nothing that’s ever been seen.
Everywhere, impossible heat.
All and nothing all the time.
|
||||
3. |
The Alphabet
04:12
|
|||
|
We laid ourselves bare,
we allowed ourselves to be still,
we felt the sweetness of wind that’s sieved through the screen.
I desire for nothing but my needs
and my needs are still unclear.
Near in touch,
near in touch and spirit,
in the word and in the breath
in all the lives that give me pause,
that fill my sight.
I begin with what I know today
and I will leave with nothing left to miss.
Without the burden of a question,
freed from debt and expectation.
Peace is an idea I render useless,
disproportionate,
passed through me and inverted.
One day it will come easily to me,
perch itself within my soul,
and I will step aside to let it in -
a power unadorned and patient.
The God beyond the self.
The God in warmth and rhyme.
I want to feel that way all the time.
|
||||
4. |
Echinacea
04:12
|
|||
|
An unbreakable spirit occupies everything that grows:
The weeds that break through the street,
the root that overturns the stone.
There is love in all things and all things can be discovered.
Cold April morning,
the thinnest fog over the garden.
Dragged our mattress to the curb and stopped just before the steps.
Echinacea in bloom,
radiant and still.
I come apart forcing my hands into the soil.
Life presses on outside of time.
It bends upward through the earth.
When it’s you breaking the surface,
let me know.
|
||||
5. |
Annalisa
03:59
|
|||
|
We laughed and peeled the cast into the sink.
I kissed the length of your arm when you asked me to,
yellowed like paper,
slack like a rope in my hands.
The sight touches us the same way and our responses harmonize.
I will never have to learn to laugh again.
Annalisa,
every choice that you make in our service,
all the words that I mean in your language,
nothing divides us that can’t be unlearned.
Blindsided by the forms,
I rub your back through your coat
as the space heater hums.
Something steals the weight from beneath you
the night before we leave.
Ginger to settle,
ginseng to balance.
Strength in rest,
and the rest is unknown.
We trade the greatest word that we share back and forth:
Ahavah,
Ahavah,
Ahavah.
In pace with her teachings,
the same taste on all tongues.
Love will embolden and find everyone.
|
||||
6. |
Red in Your Beard
03:53
|
|||
|
I’m in love with his mind,
expansive and bold,
curious and true,
but he’s shaking himself out of these dreams
four or five times a week.
Whimpers that graduate to moans,
peeling a scream from a wet set of lungs.
Holding him closely,
coaching his breathing,
words of assurance,
the assurance of meaning.
I tell him that I’ll never leave him.
I say it enough times for him to know that it’s true.
I promise I’ll be right here when he wakes up,
and all things grow still in this moment we share.
You should have seen him this morning.
He was really amazing,
telling jokes and bathing alone.
I was deflating my mattress when he started screaming.
He was by himself at the table,
rubber bowl near his feet.
We sat against the stove
and I hummed something low
until it was over.
There’s some red in your beard now.
It’s been a strange sensation,
catching you aging.
I hadn’t noticed before today.
You were standing behind me in the mirror,
watching me shave,
confused by the tears I held back as I helped you undress.
|
||||
7. |
Together This Time
05:20
|
|||
|
Leaving your side is never simple
but it feels impossible today.
Try not to get extinguished and do your best to look away.
Trust in song and hope in crisis.
We can try it together this time.
We keep something that burns us
and release it in the space between breaths.
I cradle our blue flame eternal.
It flickers in my palms,
it dances on the train.
I stoke its embers as you sleep
until it reaches back toward me.
What comfort stills the grieving?
What speech reprieves the punished?
There are only moments,
and moments act alone,
to hold you secure,
to let pain forget how to reach you.
There is nothing left to need in your company,
in your embrace.
New heat for the world within.
Nothing left for us outside.
Just baby’s breath on the windowsill,
sunflowers by the door,
a bottle of wine for the bed,
and a curtain of snow for the streetlight.
Headlights pass across the lake,
cutting through the fog below.
They dance against the shades
and we make love on top of the sheets.
When you laugh I laugh with you.
|
||||
8. |
Bamboo
02:52
|
|||
|
It was the middle of February
and then sometime in July.
Once more by your birthday.
A ring of candles,
a sharper chorus with each passing year.
Why does he look at you
so much more carefully than the others?
What makes him tend so closely?
Stretch out and recline,
turn over the day
and leave your window open.
Spinning shameless against wet stone.
Spitting up drunk in the driveway.
Cigar clippings by the bamboo.
A matte network of indigo veins
wrestling covers over pillows,
yelling at the TV with your parents,
helping you out of your clothes,
climbing off you and rolling back
onto new blue sheets.
|
||||
9. |
||||
|
The breeze was gentle on the day that Robin finally died.
With wedding photos on the pillow by her side,
her favorite tea getting cold,
she slipped quietly away.
At her bedside,
beneath the window,
beside myself,
I sang her favorite songs
over the din of the machines
that kept her in this world with me.
When she passes,
she passes smiling,
brave and prepared.
“You can sing me anything.”
Loss offers no rehearsal,
just space and distance to consider,
and If you weather the grief
you’ll be born again.
There is a promise,
and it’s hidden at the bottom.
It yearns to be discovered
and discard its ghost within.
This was our only truth.
I know its purpose when she speaks to me.
|
||||
10. |
Yom Kippur
03:40
|
|||
|
The new year comes and goes.
The knot pulses dimly in my back.
Warm for October,
asleep for most of the fast.
Shirtless in the kitchen to present one final appeal.
Bite my palm to draw blood,
grind the enamel down to the gum.
The irreverence of my thoughts,
the maze of my biology,
ugly in behavior,
damp and gray around the bone.
Kol Nidre,
here before you in uncertainty.
Stoned through the week just to collapse into the next,
praying gently in traffic,
propelled forward only by necessity.
Ashamnu,
far too much to remember.
22 and witless with assumption.
I require more of myself.
Beloved is man,
the image I reflect.
|
||||
11. |
Through To the End
04:02
|
|||
|
The flesh persists and the skin abides,
but I was not designed to be capable.
I understand all of this now more than ever before.
Klonopin in my body,
hungover at the calling hours,
hazily carving a trench through an itch.
Fresh irritations cascade in webs up the length of my arm.
I put your name down in the guestbook
just because I knew she’d love to see it.
When I hear your voice behind me
I half expect to wake up back on the floor.
You stand so much prouder now.
You’ve grown your hair longer,
curling down toward your shoulders.
There’s still that wonder in the way that you speak.
What choice did we ever have?
Through pain and aging,
through all that we’ve seen,
our endless refrain:
“Made through my will,
through to the end.”
|
||||
If you like DRUSE, you may also like:
supported by 4 fans who also own “Honey from the Rock”
After i listened to the first song, i know i had to buy the album. So emotional. Love the lyrics. Thank you so much.
go to album
NO ESPERANZA
by this is the part where you help me
This Jersey crew makes a ferocious mix of guttural grind and heavy hardcore punk, with lyrics aimed square at sociopolitical ills.
go to album
Purple Vellocet
by Purple Vellocet
Killer psych rock coming from Bilbao, Spain.
go to album
The mix of shoegaze, punk, and noise from this Seattle band is notable for its urgency and bright, foregrounded vocals.
go to album
Nalesca Mantega channel nature sounds into warm, experimental ambient with a dubby undercurrent.
go to album
Infusing live drums with glitched-out guitar fuzz and politically charged bars, Youniss reckons with a world still entrenched in anti-Blackness.
go to album
The Leaves Of Autumn Symmetry
by Perennial
Five heady, "studio-as-instrument" reworks of tracks from the New England band's excellent 2017 debut, "The Symmetry of Autumn Leaves."
go to album
