WORDS THAT GO WITH SONGS

People periodically ask to know our lyrics. For the consideration of interested parties, here are the words for our first EP – available to download on our website. (My slim and self-serving first volume of poetry will be published sometime in the next year. Really though, its part of a trilogy, so you might want to wait until all three are out.)

I Want To Be Your Boyfriend.
Heading out on a sinking ship that the moonlight rides in a waxy strip, where the water beats the shore with a relentless fist and the ocean sighs when it births you up from the rising tide. I want to be your boyfriend. I want to lead you around by the belt buckle and put you down with a roll of my eyes, to be the cupid pissing in the fountain that you sigh beside and every word you whisper I’ll consider even if it’s a lie. I want to be your boyfriend. And I want it to not scare you when I stare at you for hours on end. I want to be your boyfriend.

Julia (I Can't Sleep).
Well, all those handsome drunks you drink with were all once lovely boys, in corduroys and clip-on ties whose mothers combed their hair. I want a ride home from this bar tonight but you live just across the street in a house with a doomed couple, you keep their fights subdued and their rent cheap. I can’t sleep these days, Julia. There’s a front room, wide and high, the kind a piano looks good inside, that you could have played if you were the kind of southern girl who’d be worth the time and the practice and the money, worth the patience and the noise but you were smoking pot and cigarettes and making all of the wrong kind of threats. I can’t sleep these days, Julia. Adam thinks that you hate him and that your haircut’s too severe but my heart leapt when you smiled on seeing me and sat down with your beer. I want to let you take me home some night, Julia, when you’re not sad anymore, Julia, and you can take me home if you’re ready to go now then I will ready to go too, soon. You’ve got bedroom that the sun shines in and it smells like sweets and medicine and a back yard where dragonflies are always doing it in the springtime. I can’t sleep these days, Julia.

100,000.
Kate, I am consoled by the fact that you live in the town I packed up and fled. You’ve got the windows cracked and a fine young man to keep old cobwebs swept, but down the street that I lived on there are lights still on in the bedroom that we slept inside and even with his hand on your thigh you must think of me when you drive by. I wanted you to love me. Kate, I am consoled by the skirts that you wore and left in piles upon my floor, though the memory grows dim each day that I sit and wait for you shadow to darken my door. On those nights you drove to me, eyes winking and smoldering, arms folding around me strong and tight, though to you I just meant a fuck but to me you meant a fuck of a lot. I wanted you to love me. But you keep on driving by. I went out in the forest and killed 100,000 butterflies, pinned and mounted to the walls of my room they remind me of us, young and doomed and the lies you told all summer long were sweet to taste and sweet to tongue and sweet you’d lie on a bed, undone, but when you said “boy, we’ll get no sleep tonight” you meant that one. I wanted you to love me. But you keep on driving by.

Caroline.
Driving down the interstate heading towards the shore, Caroline, I tried to be a better man but the precedent’s set and who am I to challenge it. I stopped out in nowhere between Greenville and Kill Devil Hills so I could photograph a garage door nostalgically posed on the side of the road I spent the night in a beach house with a screen door. The saltwater breeze thick and warm on my skin sent in the ocean singing and roaring. Caroline, I love that girl and I love a good time. I think that she’s thinking of me when she plays, she’s thinking of me when she shakes and she sings. And Caroline, I want to sleep with your sister. She’s younger and firmer and pretty and dumb, and she’s got a holy unshakable faith in God. I let the record spin; watch the clothes pile on the floor. One benefit I’ve found of living alone is jerking off when and wherever I want. And from here I can see through these windows the skyline of our little town through the trees. I throw my head back and I tense and relax I think to myself “just stop holding your breath, you’re finally free.” What was it you promised me, when I was sixteen you whispered, I listened. It was the springtime and I was naive and it took seven years before I found the strength to leave. Caroline, you’ve got a voice like a swarm of cicadas, humming in the trees out my window. If I try to sleep I will just end up dreaming on you.

Little Hope.
Sleep comes easy when you’re dull and thoughtless; I’ve been awake here for eleven days. The flags and trees go waving in the darkness, just like you when you went walking away. I tried to start shit at the show, I found a notebook and I wrote down the word “hope” and I’ll sleep with it beneath my pillow, yeah. All through this neighborhood they’re sleeping and they’re dreaming. I spy it moving out there in the grass, bobbing and weaving its way through the darkness, maybe its you coming home at last. I cut a bed out of the stone, I’ll lay my notebook and my body down and I’ll pretend that its you that I am wrapped around. And its just a sliver but my, how it shines. What little hope you left me with is mine, all mine and it lights up every night I spend waiting in the darkness.