AMERICA ADDIO

i▲ MONSTER SHOW

I want some new faces, new diseases
No-net flying trapezes
Hottentots and the siameses
the full monster show.

I stand firsthand historian
Baptized in texts victorian
Explore the ugly Orient
Distill it down for you.

Like Jacob renamed Israel
and this land Connecticut
You just resect necrotic narratives
Transplanting one that fits.
We'll write the scripts and the stage exits
and characters to be
We'll rewrite our own taxonomy.

To all those looking for work:
I can't hear what you're saying
While you're playing,
The world's smallest violins.

One half taishuh another half turk
Breeding mutatis mutandis,
Holding panspecial congress
In the halls of Washington

And so I trolled all through
that land of children
Fireflies and open fists
Redressed those devils up in ivory
Teams of top hat alchemists.
I'll groom these victims in youth,
into dictums of truth
And the penny presses will be kind to me.

I want the bodies of giants
you don't find in the west
I want the mermaids hand made and
sunk down in Fijian depths
So raise your fists and paws,
cast off Mendel's laws,
A story is all you've got left.

And in the temple of the gold pavillion
In the buttresses of the Notre Dame
In the sooty city subway lyceum
Descrying tea leaves, eyes and palms.
And they've found out the forer effect
Your own unconscious architect
We've got something for everyone.

Oh lowly, lowly.
Legless and lonely.
Crawled up to me and said: I want to
bang the drum.

And I said: Son, we don't just only
Wait for the throne, we
Found the kingdoms they'll believe
after we're done.

ii▲ THE ROPED PEOPLE

Flow out from the brook of Egypt
In the haze of the morning pink
Came herds from the east
All the birds and the beasts
All the swarms descend to drink.

And I said Shihor,
She can't support you anymore.

When you get the lake you fought for
You can lead the force to water
But you can't ever make them think
I'd have mountains of geology
Told them golems followed me
Shoals of proles extolling me
They'd have me, shut up and
Dress up the devils in ivories.

I appeal to reason
I appeal to sense.
I repeated that the means won’t
meet the ends.
I read all your numbers
I read all of your plans
I repeat that land will is
never worth the dam.

In the Black Canyon air
They'll stand a dam down there
Abandoned cheyenne prayer

Deep in the Colorado,
where the sunset paints with blood.
Deep in the Colorado,
we’ll cast an ark to stop the flood.

Brows smoke like cigarettes
Under the devil’s minarets,
Came this concrete native son.
Deep in the Colorado, comes the new Jerusalem.

iii▲ ESCAPE FROM CHICAGO 2009

We never saw the glaciers melt
We never saw the oceans rise
I'm not one for the sciences
But I can read the warning signs

This town's a lurching mass of bones
A weeping wound, a walking bruise
And when you scrape the skin,
peel back the film
The world erupts red white and blue

1488 whoa until 2012
You keep your government small
I’ll keep mine all to myself.

I'll lead you back to Zion
A team of remnant saints
I don't know where to find it
But I know what it is, and what it aint.

Angels kept Lot alive
Bullets and iodide.
We're all but meals away
From spears and tanning hides.

They know how you think,
They know how the world's men behave
They'll be sniffing your meat, they'll be tracking your heat
They'll find your scent
bleeding from your cave.

So what'll you do? what have you got
for your bug out plan?
I get twenty on a gridlocked highway
Eighteen with the fully loaded van.

You go on buy your TVs,
I'll keep on hoarding my wealth.
You want to swallo the world,
you better start with yourself.

iv▲ ASTRAY IN HAWKEYELAND

They grew a cadillac ranch
They've planted flags on the moon.
And nwo they all want to choke us,
boatloads of locusts,
Flooding in, red, white and bloomed.

Comrades of the comintern
They taught and we will learn
Horseradish and holly ferns and
Digging discourse in the ground

And in their mansions seven nannies lurk
While our kids are all at work
Planning plays in the Kolan cirques
Orchards in the round

And when the Hanomags roll into Stalingrad
Assault all the fields with theres.
Twenty five thousand bodies
muddied in the northern quarries
Carting into the Kremlin square.

Blue eyes, hot apple pies,
blot out the skies with crops,
Heat it up until it pops.
Blow them up until we're tops.
Learn me all you've ever known,
Show me how you get it grown
Get me Roswell on the phone.

We can resolder the parts
And still be fodder for sharks,
Lord knows they'll always have the seas.
And we've barely the stock
To put the wings on our hawks
Against starred and striped artilleries

But there's an art, there's an art
In the bullock heart
In the endicott and haricots.
And if we start, when we restart
The commisariat
Harvest green and gold in rows:

I will have my Grushenka
The same girl that my father adored
Take the bread from the bankers
Set everything right in the world.

v▲BOSS OF THE PLAINS

They ride out in a flock
Of peso padded pillions
Black lease of hawks
Smelling beef and boullion.

From where the sun now stands,
To the dusk we all limp along.

Taut tan and thin,
Pallid faces greasy
Bent men in tin,
Weary piece of specie

From where the sun now stands,
To the dusk we all limp along.

They gave us the wretched refuse of the world
Barren fields fresh fertilizer
Gold in your blood
Silver in your marrow.
Eyes peeking from the burr oaks,
Hiding in the shadows.

But no one buys what I was sold
So go laugh off this dirt Elijah.
Hide full of nettles,
Mouth full of metal
Heart of the devil,
The bear's coming down

Cause if its hard on you
then its hard on me
And we're all spread thin little Dorothy.
We're all dancing in a gilded dream
And cash rules everything around me

Steeled up like skirret fruits
Blood sweat and bitter roots
These plains are pulletproof
These plains you'll never know.

It's 1873
And James Cooke and the company
They buried the beast,
they aimed the corpse east
Fed it last rites before they
called in the priest.

So if your trains run to Abbadon
A black hole to hitch your wagon on
Bury your hope in what you
carry your corpse in
A bleak heap of carrion. We carry on

Submerged under Kansan floods
The octopuses eat
They scavenge through the silos,
Ink out the epitaph of wheat.

And we'll just huddle in the shadows
Of the great Carnegie trust
And if you have to pray for something
May I suggest you pray for dust.

It doesn't rain on the veldt no more.
All just rust and dust and aches and sores
When the vanes take to shaking, hurricanes in the making
Can't see anything that is green no more.

And so tonight, tonight, we wave all your debts goodbye
Write your liens in lambsblood on the door -
Give all of your leases
To the winds and caprices
Of some men who aren't in Kansas anymore.

vi▲LUCKY SIDE OF THE STREET

Here's what we're gonna do
Madison Avenue
Find me some baby blues,
That can sing in black and white.
Pack em in twenty young and twenty wide.
Brother, can you spare a light?

There's a specter hanging off of me,
Blowing in the winds the Turquoise coast.
Ashes in the ermine enclave
Cinders of the Holy Ghost

Papalettes march in Washington
Surgeon general blow your battle horn
Smoke em if you got em
We still got years to be forgotten
Years to see these sad and sodden brands reborn

Good night my dear Diluvia
You'll always have my heart.
But inside the lungs of liberty
Spreads some loathsome new disease
Silence the tongue and rends the limbs apart

Here's what we're gonna do
Up the ad revenue
Call up the evening news
And teach em just how lightning strikes.
Pack em in twenty young and twenty wide.
Brother, can you spare a light?

Long as I'm breathing, I'll scream for more.
Elijah's speaking, he has the floor.
The spirit's leaving the Sacre Coeur -
These red and greens have gone to war.

vii▲O PIONEERS!

Wrenched out of the womb,
With a will and a name.
A midwestern cocoon
And that thankless blanket,
The blustery champaign.

And my mind casts such a burden
And my tongue and teeth the same
And in my heart keeps beat
In verdant wheat,
In a rolling tide of shame.

I would meander round the ambit
Of the exploding western fold
Hearing the mellow thunder
that underscores the world.

Cradled on the anvil
Forged panhandles only girl.

Are you seeing these ghosts in the trees,
The sad souls flagged down in the drought?
As long as you live, and as long as you breathe,
You'll cursed to this earth, and you'll never plow yourself out.

Some things are better learned in calm
And some things are better learned in storm
And some things you'll never learn unless
They were burned in your brain on the day you were born.

"You were born those same two fists,
why don't you use it
To batter at the world with."

And so I'd live my life
Become a wife
Wage a campaign in the dirt
That storms in from the fields
That find defiles in the floor

And all those squandered women
Who launder linen
Fragile sallyports in skirts
Fighting battles with the armies
That they thought for sure they were.

My dear Antonia,
The whalelines of winter
Will always hold you down.
The copper flash of patched grass
That punctuates the ground.

And I don't know
I just don't know
If your bones were ever made to walk to town.
Riots of impatiens
Belie that heavy rotten crown.

viii▲SIMPLY LIVING

Everyone's an island
I just want the Island Queen.
Heath up to the highlands
Grief cutting banks back inbetween

I've never seen the sunrise in a winestained field
Ive never smelled tomorrow's snow
I've never read the love songs nature reveals
In a late bloom of marigolds.

In that epistolary poetry
I know she always wrote for me
Doggerels of daffodils
Metaphors in meadowfoam
Hudibrastics in hubiscus
Eastern nebraska in the distance and mom,
I won't be coming home for christmas.

I'm a walking ghost,
I'm a loser,
I'm a teenage Methuselah
and this year,
I won't be coming home for christmas.

In this world of hurt
In this world of hate
First world fevers are the
First ones to break.
Simply living simply.

I was born (I was grown) in midwest Gethsemane
Friends put the news up in the town gazette
I pulled a full ride, to the state for journalism
And lord, how they read it as a threat

I lived a short story, achey and boring,
Pushed the plot along with some delicate tools.
Engrained and enduring, treen to the Turing,
Carved a young man that was wooden and cruel.

And lo, here I am, a statuette of the world
A pale pamphlet, upset and unheard.
In hindsight I wager
We're all raised by nature
Some of us by the woods and some of us by the wolves.

Everyone's an island.

ix▲ROUND UP

Drape your bones in chemicals,
Polemic calls to arms
Plow and the boots,
The body and roots,
Suture feeble frames to farms.
Slow down! Everybody! Sit down, in the paddy
Waist deep in your broken alms.
At best we’re chests of nitrogen
Imbued with a certain charm.

God dreamed up Eden heaving ether from his lungs
Why flaw the floral world with humans,
Why mar felicity with sons.
I’ve hedged in sedges, seeds, and evergreens too long.
And when the bulrushes are running
I intend to ride along.

Man won’t walk to the clearing empty.
He’ll do it draped in sticks and stones.
He can’t depend on nature’s plenty.
You're left to ache when the hunger grows.
He's has long left the lotus leaf
We evicted him from out the cane.
So when you find some sin in medicine,
You leave us all to pray for rain.

I've all been plotting demons
That'd keep Borges wide awake.
They scream in from the atmosphere
And haunt under the mortal lake.
A man, a machine, Corvettes and submarines
The self consuming snake.
And the world just bursts with hunger
Thirsts for things that we can slake.

It’s been determined, we’ve evolved and won this round, so
Let the old reactor rubble, Karnataka’s doubled down.
No body’s barren when you’ve such a pregnant tongue
And from all this time that we’ve spent dreaming
Plotting new structures of meaning,
Ads and ants caught up crossbreeding
Spewing steam from out our lungs.

x▲ESSEX

My father lashed me to the life that only he knew
To the only life that he could ever know.
Born from that limited perception
Came a slow grudging acceptance
Molting out the skin Nantucket snow.

So I'll set out some summer day into the flood
Smelling salt, tasting the pennies in the spermaceti blood.
Ash and cash, a human heap
Sea shanties until you sleep
You'll be the one,
The only one, who saw the deep.

I'm laveering the foghorn slowly
Hoping that the world turns around, turns around.

There is a wisdom that is woe
Rooted in madness down below
Deposit logic in
Demented engines in the deepest holds.

Enter the thrashing animal.
Glowing eyes glint green and gold.
Whipping the sky to sails
Our ribs are iron rails,
Breathing steam and coals.

God wrought in plaster,
Ache and alabaster
Cast out from the garden
The low unloved bastard
Dissmissed and dismasted
Outwitted, outlasted
Kid there's never going home.

Descend the whalelines easy
Into the blackest gorge.
Feel the anchor heaving
Atop of lucifer.

Elijah, Elijah, Elijah floats away.

n o t e s

RECORDED IN A BEDROOM IN 2009 & 2010.
ENEMIES LIST RELEASE #09.

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