1. |
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I left it shabby and messy
I consider it a blessing,
Shattered mugs,
Paper clips,
Rooftop writings,
A plug in the wall that keeps igniting.
I'll roll up my sleeves and tuck in my t-shirt...
And leave behind this hatchet,
For your honeymoon,
Sneeze into my hands,
Covered in grease,
Roadside picnic in the guest room,
Sweep these dusty floors,
The oil spot,
A blood clot,
Mop the tiles,
Keep the towels soft.
Blues plays from an abandoned jukebox,
The cable starts fires in the summertime.
You would wait on tables and stop-signs,
While I clean plates in the sink at night,
Under my nails: vegetables and cornflakes,
Storm kept us awake.
You said "I'm tired and overwhelmed, overburdened"
Passed out later in torn curtains
To an unencumbered uncertainty,
A pulse of thunder, sprung me from slumber to absurdity.
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2. |
Matchsticks
03:33
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Glass litters a garage,
Where I scattered my days.
Skipped class for a bitter applause,
Flattered by the fading praise.
Fluorescent reflection
From a pool of piss and gasoline.
The quiet sits like a presence,
You haunt these halls a ghost in the machine.
I swear I can hear you humming
Through a cough in your lungs,
Even then you were stoned and stunning,
Carving wisdom in the bathroom stall.
While I stood outside.
Waiting in a line.
Ignore the passing time.
We'll mourn the passing time.
Fall asleep standing,
Pants catch a tumbleweed,
While ants bite my ankles,
I'm just tryna keep my nose clean.
Pick goat heads from my sneakers,
Reeks of steak and stale caffeine.
My heart breaks like that speaker,
Dropped in a pool of piss and gasoline.
If these are the two only constants,
Consider me condemned,
To a nude childhood of stolen kisses,
Play and pretend.
Bats slap the window,
Even the dog is having nightmares,
Found matchsticks in the garbage,
Taking out the trash in August,
Listless, honest, place is a promise,
Some rooms are like an island.
Before there was time to be passing,
Before there was time to be passing,
Before there was time to be passing.
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3. |
I Was Born, But...
02:40
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Water from the ceiling,
Blunts in the scaffolding,
Shaky hands peeling,
An orange, unraveling,
Hooves scrape the gravel,
Its deer in the shadows,
Like devils in the darkness,
Their gaze feels like strawberries and wine.
This silent recognition broke when the wind hit the chimes.
The key in the ignition sends us sprinting in the night.
I have a weakness to forget the floating weeds,
Surrounding me,
Leave letters never sent,
Dollars unspent,
To die atop a mountain of jewels or half-drunk,
Alone at a barstool,
Or face down in a pool.
Loneliness is not nothingness,
Loneliness is not a nothingness,
I was born but...
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4. |
Stan, My Friend
03:29
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Hammock hangs from washed out logs,
Weighed down by a puddle with tiny frogs.
The bottom broke, the dog barked and chomped,
The veins of my wrist,
I loosed the grip of my palm,
Dropped my glass,
Bent to pick the pieces from the grass.
Light squeezes through the blinds,
Laying under laundry I'll leave behind,
Should replace this bandage maybe go outside,
Grieve properly.
Can't bring myself to cry,
Despite the tear-stained pillow and puff-red eyes,
Ignore the weeping willow and last goodbyes
Roll up my sleeves indifferently.
Stan, my friend,
The electric queen,
I saw you in a magazine,
Wearing swim trunks on a sun-drenched beach,
I don't recall your hair so bleached.
The great divorce is not of body and soul,
But me from my source,
Poppy and coals,
Perhaps I'm not inclined, to poetry,
I hope I'm designed to live quietly,
With you and the cicadas and our privacy,
Accidentally eating poison ivy,
Everyday that thought fades,
But still, something remains.
So Stan, my friend,
You hectic queen,
When was that Halloween?
Plastered, bloodied, hunched on the concrete,
Stench of piss and gasoline.
Who would've guessed
That would be the last time,
We'd ever see Eugene?
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5. |
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Peppermint breath and the curls my Grandma says,
Remind her, of a long-dead husband.
Darling it's only charming when you smile.
Your lips are only cracking cause it's been a while.
I am at once a man but still a child.
Scribbled on my pants
Crossing my legs to make way,
For the large man with the top-hat,
Leather brief case,
Grinned ear-to-ear, face-to-face,
His jokes about the weather clear the place,
Of any misanthropic tendencies
His laughter a melodic dependency.
Darling it's only charming when you smile.
Your lips are only cracking cause it's been a while.
There's memory and guilt to reconcile.
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6. |
Back to Venice
03:44
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The camera slung around Benji's forearm.
Hammer and rag strapped to the loop on his waist.
Adjust his shutter to the sunset while he stammers:
"Back to Venice, to waste".
Rollerskates and murals,
Screenplays bunched against the fence,
Fresh dates, lemonade at a funeral
We'll bring candles,
Kiss the cheeks, of strangers and newborn babies
Who look like our friends did once.
The young men and their motorcycles,
Belong to cowboys,
Celluloid, displayed like pastries,
They'll always be twenty in 79'.
Hiked the rest of the hill without speaking.
At the concrete plateau,
We flew a kite but when the wind blows,
And the valley gets lonely.
We will drift towards those same beaches and cities,
Split a peach there I remember it differently.
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7. |
Fireworks
06:43
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Entangled and entwined,
The threat is benign,
To disrupt and design,
Ascents and declines
On the Fourth of July,
Abandon in kind superior suicide,
Indicative disguise,
Fences, fortunes, and the flies.
No, I'm not a man not yet,
And I won't be one until my parents money well spent,
When I have shed the scent of sedatives.
The blue button-up we bought
Has lost it's pigment become fraught with growing holes,
I insist on this figment where there used to live a soul.
Cobwebs clog a tobacco pipe,
Dangling from the jaw of a parasite,
Eager, excited, to terrify.
Calcified, existed-as-thrown,
A sordid embankment on cobblestone,
Expands, unspools, overgrown.
Lived flesh through an orange press,
Trembling, grinding meat,
Shattered mug on the doorstep,
Temper in spite of defeat,
Depleted, confounded, disassembling.
Caress this absence like a phantom in retreat,
Anthems, hymns, asterisks,
The youth of the beast,
Cheated, unfounded, perishing.
Slouching, sloshed and hunchbacked,
The loves of a blonde,
Groucho Marx and Kodak,
A fireman's song,
Ordinary orchids,
Orators in jest,
Sophistry and dialogues,
Alters left wrecked.
Madness is a virtue,
Propriety upset,
By torments and anxieties that satisfy and accept.
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8. |
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Pigeons eat from hands,
Pants fray,
Spent a quarter on a cigarette,
The conveyer belt carries my suitcase,
Held images like bayonets,
I'd like to turn away,
Everydayness is just too uncanny,
Burn-holes never break,
Have memories like scars and toothaches.
The shivers,
The shakes,
Alert, wide-awake,
Nervous and hostile,
Nostrils inflamed,
Breathing is strained and short.
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9. |
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Charlatan box-man,
Unspoken wheelchair,
Traveling salesman,
Infants in refrigerators,
Bagpipes abide
Like a javelin in stride
Or a razor-blade through cellophane.
Pipe-dreams of holograms sharing the load,
Makeup on styrofoam houses and so,
I'm immune to the surgeries,
Hollowed and teething,
Flustered when breathing too slow.
Sink the boat.
Earthly possessions to barnacles lest they can float.
Imitate lightning
Under intimate lighting
When halcyon hours
Are few and so frightening,
Calendar for every year,
Courage for everyday.
The lamplight,
Sporadic and restless,
The bus that never came,
Until the morning,
Betrayed us,
Beginning all the same,
A folding house on alien terrain,
Like iodine on the gum-line, plywood dissipates.
Fingertips of rust
Like aged sandpaper,
Hungry for the spill of blood,
From an aimless razor,
Organized divides,
You were not in the desert,
Defanged, detalonized by endless orgies.
Carcinogen mucus,
And the taunting scent of,
The shape of your neck and your breasts,
Pressed in blankets,
The leather remembrance of a dream,
Pestilent, ephemeral and screaming.
I am a spaceship,
Dried mollusk husk,
Pacified plainsman inhabiting palaces in dust,
That wither the wisps,
Displaced but don't desist,
Satiate the centrifuge,
Within the cemetery
'neath the aviary,
Pygmy owls fill the mortuary,
Simply put we're the adversary,
Consequence failed by vocabulary.
WE ARE A HOUSE,
THIS IS A HOME.
Milky smoke drapes the downtown sprawl like the remnants of a ghost, That threatens it's return,
Bloodletting and taciturn,
Gnawing at the crust like a sunburn,
Clawing at discarded snakeskin,
Or a horsehair jacket in Turin,
Porcelain portraits,
Petty and worthless
Are the things that come closest and inhabit our wilderness.
Aching and flawed,
Nodding along, to the sifting hours and transiting.
A sigh is just a song,
And an album is just an artifact.
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Ishroyale Austin, Texas
Originally formed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ishroyale is now a Folk-Jazz project based in Austin, Texas consisting of Owen Holmes and Scott McRae who also operate Ish House, a recording studio and practice room in Austin.
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