Альбом mewithoutYou

Why burn poor and lonely?
Under a bowl or under a lampshade
Or on the shelf beside the bed
Where at night you lay turning like a door on it's hinges
(First on your left side, then on your right side, then your left side again)

Why burn poor and lonely?
Tell all the stones, we're gonna make a building
We'll cut into shape and set into place
Or if you'd rather be a window,
I'll gladly be the frame
Reflecting any kind of words
We'll let in all the blame
(And ruin our reputation all the same)

So never mind out plan making
We'll start living
Anyway, aren't you unbearably sad?
Then why burn so poor and lonely?

We'll be like torches - We'll be torches together!
With whatever respect our tattered dignity demands
Torches together, hand in hand

Why pluck one string?
What good is just one note?
Oh, one string sounds fine I guess....
We we're once 'One Notes'
We were lonely wheat quietly ground into grain
(What light and momentary pain!)
So why this safe distance, this curious look?
Why tear out single pages when you can throw away the book?
Why pluck one string when you can strum the guitar?
Strum the guitar!
With no beginning, with no end
Take down a guitar and strum the guitar if you're afraid,
And I'm afraid and everyone's afraid
And everyone knows it but we don't have to be afraid anymore
You played the flute but no one was dancing
You sang a sad song and none of us cried

January, 1979.
Saw a terrible crash and i couldn't help but laugh,
As my ear pressed against the past like a glass on a wall of a house in a photograph.
My forehead no longer sweet with holy kisses worthy of your fiery lips.
I was floating in a peaceful sea 'rescued' by a sinking ship.

If I could become the servant of all, no lower place to fall. (If could be your servant)
If I could become the servant of all, no lower place to fall. (If I could be your servant)
If I could become the servant of all, no lower place to fall. (If could be your servant)
If I could become the servant of all, no lower place to fall. (If I could be your servant)

You watch me like a ten car highway wreck with detached, vulgar curiosity.
This looking down at the tops of the hats of us passers-by from your 7th floor balcony.
From such a height you missed creatures too small for sight carry on covert conversations.
And the misguided insects crown me their grasshopper king with a dance of celebration.

After years with a crown on my head, I've grown overfed, unconcerned and comfortably numb.
Kept busy indulging in the pleasures of the wealthy.
(Someone make me afraid of what I've become!)
At the first sign of possible sorrow, I turned my heels and ran.
(Oh, I'll never learn.)
My life is a cup of sugar I've borrowed before time began and forgot to return.

It was a matter of time--I always said I could see so now I'm going blind. (I could be your servant)
It was a matter of time--I always said I could see so now I'm going blind. (If I could be your servant)
It was a matter of time--I always said I could see so now I'm going blind. (I could be your servant)
It was a matter of miserable time-- but I heard somewhere there was a cure for useless eyes? (If I could be your servant)

I was looking at the leaves
Climbing to the tops of the trees
But you were nowhere to be found,
Just beneath all the green
You were buried like a little seed
Among the roots and underground,
I was licking at the leaves
But I was in short sleeves and you.
You were like some sickness that I caught.
My sweetheart moved away,
Swept off like garbage in the alleyway
I need more grace than I thought.

Brother, I'm far away from everything good!
She's like a hot cloth on a fevered head
And like a needle she leads me
Well, I follow like thread
Tie me up!
Untie me!
All this wishing I was dead is getting old... is getting old
It goes on but it's old.

I was swimming through the waves
For what must have been days
But could find no relief,
When I started sinking down
I thought for certain I would drown
Until I saw you in the ocean underneath
All the bright colored fish
Tell of a treasure in a dull shell,
"Such subtlety, so easily missed!"
You, my hidden pearl of pure and perfect love
And I'm a living example of 100 percent the opposite of this,
If I ask the same questions
Well maybe I repeat myself from time to time,
But it's because everyone who answers me is a liar.

She's like a hot cloth on a fevered head
And like a needle she leads me
Well, I follow like thread
But you untied me - didn't you untie me, Lord?
And now I haven't even thought about
Killing myself in almost five months.

If you fail to see a problem,
(Which I find hard to believe)
Or if you're hanging on from branches
Licking honey from the leaves you say
"The hopelessness of living, and the childishness of suicide"
But there's a call to love my brother
That can never be destroyed
However much you talk,
However well you talk
You make a certain sense
It's still only stupid talk
However much I strut around
However loud I sing the Shining One inside me won't say anything

Oh, to want one thing!
Purity of heart is to want one thing

You'll remind me how I said you were
A quiet bed in all my noise to rest
Well I was charming you at best
And you remember, dear, when I said how
"My coming here was like a terrible fall!"
As we crept like thieves along your bedroom hall
I'd come down and touch your eyelids,
But if you stay up too late I'll throw you back into the cupboard
With all the chipped and dirty plates
Like the carnival game with the bottleneck and rubber ring,
Even if you win, even then you don't win.

All I want is to want one thing.

Call me outside I'll come running down.
When I satisfied each need invented by my eye
I was a nest by a fox's hole or dirt underneath your boots soles
when I satisfied each need invented by my eye
it was nothing like I'd imagined.
Like cocaine, their green eyes fixed on the television to pass the time
until their two miles of elegant blinds halfway raised for the watching as you walked by
"Look, come to the window
She carries a candle at mid-day while the sun's still so high!"
But you knew better than to pay mind to what to people and the devil say call me outside,
I'll come running down into the vacant, intoxicating night,
call me outside to their haunted streets, their red electric lights,
I'm on the sad side of a nowhere town,
but sister I'm all you got so call me outside,
I'll come running down - Then, not another word.

He made the world a grassy road before our bare, wandering feet,
and crushed the stones into the softest sand between our toes,
but we're wondering where to sleep,
clever words on pages turn to fragments;
Circles, points and lines, and cover them like carpets, with graceful,
meaningless ornamental designs come quick,
you light that knows no evening
Come, alone to the alone!
I have a thousand half-loves well worth leaving for to take your madness home,
you dance inside my chest where no on sees you,
but sometimes I see you
rejoice, the cleansing of my lips
Rejoice, salvation of my soul!
But I still have a thousand half-loves
(Oh my God! I want to shoot myself just thinking about it)
And you think I don't mean what I say?
Well I mean every word I say.
I threw a stone at the reflection of my image in the water,
and it altogether disapperared.
I burst, it shattered throume like a bullet through a bottle,
and I'm expected to believe that any of this is real.

God is love and love is real,
but the dead are dancing with the dead
and though all that's charming disappears
all things lovely only hurt my head
as I gather stones from fields like pearls of water on my fingers' ends
and wrap them up in boxes,
safe from windows, from things that break,
as the night-time shined like day it saw my sorry face,
hair a mess but it liked me best that way
(Besides, how else could I confess?
When I looked down like if to pray,
well I was looking down her dress...)
Good God, please!
Catch for us the foxes in the vineyard - The little foxes.
Turn your ear, musician, to silence because they only come out when it's quiet,
their tails brushing over your eyelids
Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead!
Or the fur that they shed will cover your bed in a delicate orange-ish cinnamon red,
ah, I don't need this!
I have my loves, I have my doubts.
I don't need this.

Not one motion of her gesture could I forget
The prettiest bag lady I ever met
Pushing her cart in the rain
Then gathering plastic and glass
She watched the day pass
Not hour by hour
But pain by pain
If I was a basket filled with holes
Then she was the sand I tried to hold
And ran out behind me
As I swung with some invisible hands

I stopped believing, you start to move
She was like wine turned to water then turned back to wine
I stopped my leaving and the better man bloomed
And you can pour us out and we won't mind

I was dead, then alive
She was like wine turned to water and turned back to wine
You can pour us out, we won't mind
A scratch around the mouth of the glass
My life is no longer mine

If you're still looking for a blanket
Sweetie, I'm sorry, I'm no sort of fabric
But if you need a tailor
Then take your torn shirt, and stumble up my stairs
And mumble your pitiful prayers
And in your tangled night's sleep, our midnight needles go to work
Until all comfort and fear flows in one river
Down on the shelf by the mirror where you see yourself whole
And it makes you shiver

I stopped believing, you start to move
She was like wine turned to water then turned back to wine
I stopped my leaving and the better man bloomed
And you can pour us out and we won't mind

I was dead, then alive
She was like wine turned to water and turned back to wine
You can pour us out, we won't mind
A scratch around the mouth of the glass
My life is no longer mine

Our lives are not our own
Even the wind lays still
All I felt was fire and cold
And movement, movement
If they ask you for a sign of the Father
Tell them it's movement, movement and repose

My exit, unobserved, my homesickness, absurd
I said "water," expecting the word
Would satisfy my thirst!
Talking all about the second and third
When I haven't understood the first.

Jonah, where's that boat going -
Your ship set with eager sails?
There's a swirling storm soon blowing
And no use, fishermen, in rowing from a consecrated whale!

And just like the clouds they bring a darkness and a hard rain's gonna fall
I felt the crowds bring a loneliness and a hard rain's gonna fall.

She always weighed me down
But, afraid I might need her, I dragged her around
(It's best to keep close sackcloth and ash in a whitewashed town)
She wore that phony smile on her face,
I guess like a bandage on a wounded place
While I kept the keys to every old lock just in case.

Rehearsed indifference tossed aside,
Our narrow arms spread wide,
"What unseen pen etched eternal things on the hearts of humankind -
But never let them in our minds?"

The clouds they brught a darkness
And a hard rain's gonna fall
And all my laughter ends in emptiness
And a hard rain's gonna fall.
My every medicine causes more illness
And a hard rain's gonna fall
And until I let you go I didn't know, you were never mine at all

But now I spend my days in ever-increasingly complicated ways
Convincing myself of the rightness of each word I say
My exit, unfair if unobserved! My exit, unfair if unobserved!
Ya sabur, subhannallahi, a-uduhu billah minash-shaitnair-rajim, al-hamdu lillah, bismillahir rahmanir rahim.

I wrote a four word letter,
With post-script in crooked lines,
Although I'd lived I'd never been alive.
You know who I am - you held my hand!
As I travelled blind
Listening to a whispering in my ear,
Soft but getting stronger,
Telling me the only purpose of my being here
Is to stay a little longer.

Stealing a bicycle chain,
As the handlebars crashed to the ground,
The back wheel detached from the frame,
It kept rolling, yeah, but aimlessly drifting around.

Oh, doubters, let's go down,
Lets go down - won't you come on down?
Oh doubters, lets go down-
Down, to the river to pray?

But I'm so small I can barely be seen - how can this great love be inside of me?
Look at your eyes - they're small in size, but they see enormous things.

Wearing black canvas slippers
In our frog-on-a-lily-pad pose
We sewed buttons and zippers
To chinese pink silk
And olive night clothes
If you can someday stop by
Somehow we'll show you the pictures and fix you some tea
(see, my dad's getting a bit older now and just unimaginably lonely).

Oh, pretenders, let's go down
Lets go down- won't you come on down?
Oh, pretenders
Lets go down-
Down to the river and pray?

Oh but I'm so afraid, and I'm set in my ways
But he'll make the rabbits and rocks sing his praise.
But I'm to tired, I won't last long.
No, he'll use the weak to overcome the strong!

Oh, Amanda, let's go down
Lets go down- won't you come on down?
Mama, Nana, lets go down, down in the dirt by the river to pray?

You struck the match - why not be utterly changed by fire?
To sacrifice the shadow and the mist
Of a brief life you never much liked - So if you'd care to come along we're gonna curb all our never-ending,
clever complaining (as who's ever heard of a singer criticized by his song?)
We hunger, but though all that we eat brings us little relief we don't know quite what else to do,
We have all our beliefs but we don't want our beliefs,
God of peace, we want you.

On a bus ride into town
I wondered out loud "Why am I going to town?"
And as I looked around at the billboards and the stores
I thought "Why do I look around?"
And I kissed the filthy ground
And in the first dry spot I found
And I didn't have to wonder why I was laying down.

Before long I was too cold
Took a bus back to the station
I found a letter left by a pay phone
With no return contact
And it read like a horn blown by some sad angel
"Bunny, it was me... it was me who let you down"
It was the shyest attempt I'd ever seen at conversation

If I didn't have You as my guide I'd still wander lost in Sinai,
Counting the plates of cars from out-of-state,
(how I could jump in their path as they hurry along!)
You surround me, you're pretty but you're all I can see,
like a thick fog - if there was no way into God,
I would never have laid in this grave of a body for so long.

And Bonner fair always came through the first week of September
But it's already the 19th
And there's no sign of it.
Yet I have a hard time
Remembering all the things that I should remember
And a hard time
Forgetting the all things that I am supposed forget.

Oh Christ when You're ready to come back
I think I'm ready for You to come back
But if You want to stay wherever exactly it is You are,
That's okay too - it's really none of my business.
If I didn't have You as my guide I'd still be wandering lost in Sinai
Or down by the tracks watching trains go by to remind me:
There are places that aren't here.
I had a well but all the water left
So I'll ask Your forgiveness with every breath,
If there was no way into God,
I would never have laid in this grave of a body for so long, dear.

I'll ring your doorbell
Until you let me in
And I can no longer tell
Where 'you' end and 'I' begin

Grape on the vine
We've been alone a long time
Grape on the vine
Why not be crushed to make wine?

Pay no attention to me
Dancing with my girl
We have every intention to be
Failures in this world

Grape on the vine
We've been alone a long time
Grape on the vine
Why not be crushed to make wine?

Six of my closest friends
Will dig up the ground
All my accomplishments
Gently lowered down

Grape on the vine
We've been alone a long time
Grape on the vine
Why not be crushed to make wine?

(All is the same to the souls of those so much resigned)

The son of the widow
You raised from the dead
Where did his soul go
When he died again?