See also: Unreleased Songs
‘A Thought’ is my current favorite of all my songs. I know I have one friend who agrees, so I’ll share the full lyrics.
A year’s residual thoughts are filling my living room.
The shape they take describes my future,
and my mind wanders around the first floor of its house,
as my fixations take form and float about.
I think of this word ‘regret’ and there is only
that locked bathroom door and the first boy I ever loved,
pounding his sneakers into his forehead, and I can’t forget,
when he opened that door his face was soaking wet.
And every criticism and insult,
each small perceived attack against me I have listed.
If you know me well you can’t miss it.
But there seems time enough for someone to someday here each one
and tell me that isn’t true.
Hold me, weeping, and tell me that isn’t true,
hold me and tell me all of that isn’t true,
that none of it is true. None of it is true.
But that won’t be said by you.
Once I visited an old woman’s house and she gave me
fractured stories of every item it contained.
But mine has things that are never named.
But I don’t believe there is any grand purpose in remembering,
when every crack in the pavement seems to overflow,
wanting to unload on me every story it knows.
Oh but how unpleasant it is to go on a walk
when you do not listen. I’d rather go alone
so I can hear things clearly the way I do at home.
I’m just escorting this heart which can’t be trusted
to socialize out in the general public,
this heart like a deformed child you’d lock in the basement,
or a debutante that’s obscenely wasted,
it’s poisoned by his tears it tasted.
I want to throw away something randomly,
throw it as suddenly and uselessly as it entered me.
I want to throw away something randomly,
throw it as suddenly and uselessly as it entered me.
It is sticky and shadowy today and one room runs into the next.
I once ran a threaded needle through my breast,
then pulled the string back and forth through the flesh.
Oh what an awful mess! Pus has such a sickly stench.
But that is how I tell my stories,
forwards and backwards, played with and replayed
till their soaking wet.
I’m not quite ready to let them heal up yet.
But can’t we talk about the constructions in the silence between us,
and link our mythologies until our old lies find topics on which to chat?
All right, just please don’t answer that.
Or couldn’t you take something small of mine,
a dirty dish towel or old bottle of vinegar,
and begin to realize?
Or couldn’t you just look me in the eyes.
Can you feel your ghost haunting my house?
It’s watching when memory opens that bathroom door.
It stands by me when you can’t stand me anymore.
A thought that thinks back to me is what you are.
A thought that thinks back to me is what you are.
A thought that thinks back to me is what you are
when I’m alone and these moving hands are only my own.
If you’d come around here you’d already have known.
