Applause, applause to the elegance
Of obsessing over its elements.

Like a cold knife to butter--
Rise like body of water
When you're sipping your rum.
Sometimes I'm crazy in love
With the thing you'll become.

If you think you're unhealthy
It's always hit and miss
Cause if you don't think of it
Then it doesn't exist.

But you don't think like that,
'Cause you're the wool and the linen
Sunday apples and jeans
The salty sand on the boardwalk
The terracotta and greens

Which stretches to Palm Desert
Over a rovering clover
Sob'ring my fields of thoughts
If you think you've forgotten
Then you already forgot.

Because my strings do tend to ravel and unwind,
I made a pact to do good and be kind.
But now I find my sacred rest in what I couldn't find inside my mind.

Now it's time the end to face the means,
For things are most forgotten in the in-between.
The gothic wave of tiredness eloped a movement in the crashing scene.


Epithet, the epithet--
You feel the heat in the summer,
And the love in the fall,
And the lonely in winter,
And the spring will recall

All the feelings you have felt.
It bled into your paintings
In the passing of years
An apparition of color
A blind Orion of tears.

Which always stains my clothes.
It turns into my laundry
Which my mother still cleans
Though she don't get to see
My tired face for weeks.

You can't undermine its call
When it speeds to your doorstep
And keeps spitting half-truths
All dressed up in a bowtie
With black slacks and black suits.

It's a mystery to us all;
Like voodoo dolls in a cornfield.
Like my sister's dad.
Like my brother in prison.
Like my new mother sad.

Figure it out on your own.
From what I've learned from astronomy,
You'll get to know the things you'll never get to see.

It's quiet now across the blasphemic sky.
But we lay awake in sparks that shoot too high.
The holy flame across my face did sear my lips and blind me in both eyes.

I'm searching for some hint, or clue, or sign
That my whole life will leave something worthwhile behind.
But when my body leaves this place, I'll still remain beside these words of
mine.

Watch me run!
C'mon! C'mon! C'mon!

They told me when I was a boy
To write every thing Mangum said down.
I was their scribe,
I was indescribable.