Lies

Read me a story about all those years ago
And all those people who waited for beauty
Who prayed for the truth to come and never go
We’re still waiting; I’m still waiting to see

Tell me what you wanted to hear
Show me what I wanted to see
Show me that there’s nothing to fear
Say that’s what you want from me

Give me what you want me to hold
Tell me what you want me to know
Ask me to do whatever I’m told
Tell me the meaning of this show

I love your lies, tell me some more
I want to pretend everything’s alright
I wasn’t there, but I see you’re sore
Hey, tell me who won the fight

Tell me why I didn’t see you yesterday
The truth is I don’t want to know it
Don’t tell me you didn’t see I stayed
I waited for you. I kept the candle lit.

So tell me about all those
Who waited for absolution
Who stayed in the path they chose
To the final resolution

This is a fairy tale run through a sieve
All the truth has filtered through
I believe I want to believe
You believe that I believe you.

War Is Hell

Love is war, war is hell
So in the name of war
We should agree
To always
Always
Violently
Disagree

And we should walk around
With our hands on our guns
And we shouldn't give diplomacy
Another chance
And we should have hair triggers
On our bombs
And we should cross the borders
Every week
And we should point and click
Where the missile goes
And we should celebrate
The victories
And we should recover from
The defeats
And we should use bullets
Not words
And the world should know
How we feel

And when the war has ended
And we fight our peace
We should bandage
Our wounds
And bury our dead
Feelings.

Save Your Life

It was a long long time ago
When I told you that I loved you
And even now, even so
I'm afraid that it may still be true

And I know I tried to forget
Still I can remember when
It's been years since the day we met
And I've gotten old since then

And ever since then I drank deep
My mouth was filled with the taste of death
I always loved the illusion of sleep
And the longest drags were my breath

And to every girl who smiled at me
Thank you for helping me forget
Sometimes when I wish to be free
Thank you for adding to my regrets.

And to everyone who put me on the shelf
Yellow, brown, red, women all the same
They did nothing to me I didn't do to myself
So I don't have them to blame.

And god it's been a long long time
Since I saw you last, I wonder
How you're doing now between rhymes
And if you'll come and wander.

And how I hate those people who
Don't believe in love, those who don't live
Who denounce the lover's ways too
Who are so empty they have nothing to give

And all the broken hearted kids who
Dress in black and cry at night and write and write
The whiners, the fakers, and the cutters too
Will drink and smoke cigarettes until everything's right

And we'll find solace in the illusion of death
Even those who hurt deepest with the feeling I share
And it'll be so cold you can see your breath
And it'll be so white like the blankest stare

And those of us who hate life in our shame
Will love only love from the edge of a knife
Because the day love and life are the same
Is the day you find the girl who will save your life.

Daring to Be Forever

I see you staring back every time I look in the mirror
So here I am blowing smoke in your face again and staring into my eyes
The ones that were dull and brown but yours were so full of life
So much like the sea, always the most beautiful green
I was so much younger then when I was content to
Live like I just wanted to breathe and let it be enough
But now I feel like my arms are always so empty and I want to
Hold you closer than you would ever let anyone else

I haven’t been drinking again. I promised you I would stop.
And I quit smoking yesterday, I threw away my last pack
But here in the mirror where your ocean eyes should be
There are just mine and they’re so bloodshot and red.
And you were right, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. You said
You wouldn’t hurt me but you would be hurt yourself
But it hurts me already when I cough and rub my eyes
And in my chest it just aches and aches and aches

I called you and listened to your answering machine
And I carried on the most wonderful conversation
Where you answered all my questions and we left no mysteries
Unsolved and you told me you loved me and I said the same
And I told you about all those other women, the ones I might have loved
The girl with the brightest blonde hair or the girl with the saddest grey eyes
The ones that were so much like the storms and the rain she loved
The one I could have kissed in the dark for everyone to see

And you said you forgave me you forgave me you forgave me
And you took the cigarette from my lips and the bottle from my fingers
And you smiled at me and you said you liked me better when I
Wasn’t killing myself with the weight of all my sorrows
And I said I was sorry I was sorry I was sorry
To everyone and you and I said I’d give them another chance
And I said goodbye and I let your machine beep in vain
Because I won’t dignify it with how I feel.

And to that dial tone I told you it was good to talk to you again
And I thanked you for helping me understand one more time
I said I’ll see you soon, won’t you smile for me then?
I’ll introduce you to my latest lover, she’s nothing like you.
And you said you forgave me you forgave me you forgave me
And I don’t need to apologize anymore, I have nothing to be sorry for
You understood what it was like to be young and in love and desperate
To be young and in love your whole life or even daring to be forever.

Like a Runaway

I wish thinking of you made me happy like I pretend it used to.
And I wish it wasn’t feeling the pain in my heart that makes me feel alive.
I want to remember the times when I didn’t simply pass through the days.
And I want to be able to stop living like a drifter or like a runaway.
I used to want to just put all my money in my pocket and get away,
But now I just want to wrap my hand around something real.

I would like more than anything to just live and love and let it be enough
But I know it’s not, it’s not; it’s not satisfying me. I feel too empty.
I just want some certainty – I want to know some things are absolute truth
And I want some stability – I want to know what the future holds
I could do with clarity – I’ve always wanted to know what I want.
I need some answers; I could do with some goddamned meaning.

And I want to get rid of all these feelings that I have about you and everyone
I want to stop feeling like I am going to be sick, and I want to stop feeling
Like I don’t know if I should laugh or cry, and I don’t want to feel like I am dying
Whenever I kiss someone, and I don’t want to put you under a magnifier
It’s not funny, it’s not happy, it’s not tragic, it’s sincere, it’s laughing because it’s so sad.
It’s not love, it’s not regret, it’s pathetic, it’s the truth, it’s crying because it’s not funny.

Come on baby, laugh with me. Well, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
This is what we may call irony or coincidence or just a run of bad luck.
This is the thing I forgot to remember or remembered to forget
This is the final shred of evidence that convicts me and breaks my heart
These are the wages of honesty, of daring to think I could tell your truths
It’s what I get for hoping I could be honest enough for both of us.

Thinking back now all I can remember is the falsities of imagination
Thinking about you and me and “we” and what that could have been.
“The past is past” is the moral of this story, don’t dwell on before
But I was tired of being so sad all the time, I was ready to be happy.
But by that time it was all too late, and your bags were piled in the car.
So I thought that maybe if I stopped caring time would lose its meaning.

I hate how I can only appreciate these little pieces of sorrow.
I’ll listen to another sad song from another sad singer.
Because you know, I always thought tragedy sounded better,
And happiness always seemed so insincere.
It’s foolish of me to think sadness is the only true emotion
But it’s been so long that it’s the only one I can remember.

So love, let’s live like runaways. Let’s just get our money and get away.
Being alone isn’t so bad if you can find a way to be alone together.
And this time we’ll do it right, we’ll let there be no mystery
This time you’ll understand and you’ll show me that and this time
I won’t be so afraid, there will be nothing to hide or avoid
And we’ll bask in the truth, the truth, the freedom our truth brings

And you’ll laugh it up with me love, well, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
If you can’t laugh at yourself who can you laugh at?
I always thought you were so much like a suicide
Well come on baby, you were always my favorite way to die
And I promise you I won’t let it hurt too bad, it’s not too late
Don’t you know there are so many better ways to die?
Ha ha ha, goddamn. There was no better way to die.

Maybe It's Not What You Wanted...

Maybe it's not what you wanted, but these were all things you adore
Tell me what went wrong, what was it you were waiting for?

One more time we sink into the lessons of life and love, those hard earned nuggets of wisdom and the pieces of freedom we fought and bled for. There was no victory like the one we tasted at the end of that day, sitting together in the starlight with our slit wrists oozing salt water together onto the sand. It tasted like tears but it was dry as the powdered sugar we could still feel on the tips of our tongues, chalky and powdery and fake, the sickly sweet saccharine smell of chloroform in our nostrils. You were warm like the token body, simply there, a dead weight in my heart. You hung there as if you were in a hammock stretched leisurely in the trees, swinging gently in the breeze.

There was no defeat like the one I suffered that night, when I felt my past fall away as if it were a thousand pounds of iron. The manacles opened under your touch but still I feel them as if they were as tightly clasped around my wrists as they were on that summer day all those years ago, when a great monster of steel swept my youth and innocence away and replaced it with these chains, cold and red with the color of the rust in my blood. Her scars stretched across her smooth ankles for miles, cut like little smiles in her flesh, smooth as the gash in my knee - a demonstration of the difference between human beings and animals. Steak knives are simply for meat. That day she pulled her pant legs down over her ankles, I was a stranger to her again.

But you hung there in the hammock in my heart. The heartstrings quiver and creak with your unfamiliar weight. I test the supports and sit next to you and we lie there under the night sky and it is infinite. The stars stretch for miles above the red-purple clouds of the light night sky. We can see through them for the first time in years, and for a moment everything is as clear as when at birth our eyes are opened to the world, to the blood and the air and the noise and the white disinfectant expanse of sterility. I choke upon the words I could never say. I spit them out, a hoarse whisper issuing from my lips as the letters thud like lead into the concrete. You picked them up and gave them back, perhaps knowing I could not let them go, perhaps knowing they weren't for you. The address of the recipient is blank, a hastily scribbled mass of white paint covering the ink. We pick at it with our nails until the truth is revealed.

I gasp again for breath. The newborn babe cries as its lungs finally fill with air, and I fall to my knees, 'what have I done, what have I done.' You beg to be let go. I am holding you too tightly. I am hurting you. But it is no worse than I have been hurt. The knives and words and the blood are as fresh in my mind as they have always been, as real and as missing as the pieces of my heart. It was six stitches with a fishhook, they could always sew me back up. But the pieces I lost, they could put them on ice. I remember it was cold. At least, I shivered. I shook like you shook, with nerves and with anticipation. But I shook because it was as dry as the salt on my tongue, as cold as the coins on my eyes. The cross in your hands is no comfort. I can hold one too. I can bear it on my back for miles but I cannot be your savior.

When I broke my heart you broke yours with me. 'It matches,' you said, forcing a smile. But it didn't. Your half was larger, and you tried to cut yours straight down the middle. 'It matches,' you said. We traded. Left for left or right for right, an eye for an eye or a thumb for a thumb. I let you have the bigger half. But it was broken, and you broke yours with me, like your promises and your commitments. How many more would I take my hammer to, how many more would absence sap the warmth from and sharpen to a razor's edge? It's too small to halve again, but I cannot bear to take it back. I must simply give it away. Now I have nothing. 'What have I done, what have I done.' She was innocent, you were innocent, I was innocent. But we changed that. You threw it away in those dark nights. I traded it for wisdom. But she is innocent. It's funny how you used to be too, but only to me. We learned our bitter lessons about life and love, about war and hate and loss and sorrow.

They were our first lessons in irony, as rusted as our blood and as heavy as a square of iron forged in a liquid pool of fire, where the men who tend it and cut the squares free may singe holes in their new blue jeans. So we filled the void left by our happiness with replacements which may or may not be equal or better. You swallowed your medicine, your bitter pills you tried to fix yourself with. I gulped down the feelings, timeless and eternal, hoping to understand. Through it all, we all lay under the same stars, watching the same sky. The sun rose on you and set on me, and in those days you lived in the future and we believed we could grasp the future by the throat and claim it for our own, but it was wild and untameable, and it taught us lessons of its own. So we nursed our wounds and thought about these lessons as well. Life is most painful in reverse.

I held her like I held you in those final moments. We were different people then, always going places and staying in others. I couldn't let go. You had to push me away. We all forced our smiles. Life is better when you smile. But your bloody ghost cuts away my layers until there is only my longing left, and I can't smile with you watching me. I asked you if you remembered those nights together under the sky. The only memories you have now are by proxy. You remembered me. But where were you? Ah, it grows foggy. Above the clouds the stars are always there. But here on the ground it is red and purple and it swirls all around us, laughing and laughing and laughing. It sweeps away our uncertainty and the plans we made and the times we shared and our memories and we are born again, left once again to gasp for breath and let the hot air fill our tiny lungs, choking on our words and sorrows and being crushed by the weight of life and loss and love and the lessons we have to learn, those hard lessons we repeat until we understand.

~Ben

The Easy Way

I felt it was time to confess again, it’s scary
How it’s so easy to make these things up now
After a while sorrow’s second nature, the only thing real
It’s easier when you think, harder when you feel.

It’s funny how things always come around.
I always felt most comfortable kissing in the dark.
They say not to trust a girl who doesn’t close her eyes
But it’s all the same at night, cause neither do I.

See, there’s nothing I could do
To make you more modest
You’ve never been less than yourself.
And there’s nothing you could say
To make me less honest
I’ve always been true to myself.

And I always longed to feel it that way
That kind of truth you see in the love notes
The teachers took up and read aloud, the ones
That you laughed at but hurt for at the same time.

You know I wrote you so many of those.
But there’s only so much that rhymes with
“I love you” or “I know this much is true,”
You know, besides “I found someone new.”

See, there’s not much I can do
As detached and faraway as I am
You know what distance does to me.
But there’s not much else I can say
I still want to be in love with you
But we know what time does to me.

I always appreciated the simplicity
Of taking the easy way out, since you know
I’ve gotten so acquainted to it in my shame
You and her and her and her always did the same.

So I don’t know what to call what I’ve got now
I’ve always thought tragedy sounded better
But this could possibly be so good for me
It feels so strange to perhaps finally feel happy.

Jazz Response

Saw Tom Wolfe, Hank Lazer, and Chris Kozak a couple weeks back
Thought maybe I could be a beat poet too.
Could hang out in coffee shops just like my dad
Wear a black turtleneck in an old black ‘n white
Sip black coffee
Listen to some Coltrane, Count Basie
Maybe...
Some Dizzy Gillespie?
It’s not the same at Starbucks nowadays.
Paying too much to be “alternative.”
Let’s listen to those horns
And it will…
Maybe it will sound
Just like the boogie woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred.
Isn’t that right, daddy?

Hammer the Nails

Baby you and me under that purple
Orange blue red white sky
We lay in the grass and watched
Our lives pass us by
There were dogs and cats
And sailing pirate ships
There were friends and
Our former lovers
But baby it’s only current lovers
That matter at all to me

Nothing broke my heart more
Than the sound of you not breathing
There next to me, we missed out
On the glamour of Seventeenth Street
Where the pretty girls walk by
And you aren’t among them
I could have picked you out from the crowd
And I could have been “Dying all day
In thousands of little ways”
But I was tired of the charade

So it was the motion of our hands
Waving good bye to the past
That closed the lid on this box
Say we godspeed to your earthly remains
Yes, godspeed you across that sea
Or into that black afterlife after me
And I hesitated to write the final
Word of this book, because
There won’t be an epilogue.
Hammer the nails.