| Nightly, empty, luminous ballrooms roll back in your skull
|
| I resigned myself to all the disappearance
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| I was sure the cops would come calling
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| Some sick shivering morning
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| I live in Newark now where cars speed away
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| And weekend freebasers bury their stems
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| In shaded groves and muted clearings
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| In Philadelphia, we didn’t know
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| Clammy hands and beaming thresholds
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| And I’m visited by naked reality
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| In the higher gloss of the cars that cut in front of me
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| And depression is nothing compared to what’s in store for them
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| Having hitched across America
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| Like an itinerant laborer
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| Or a serial killer on pulsing arterials
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| I numbly recline
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| In a filthy slicked lawn chair
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| As our garage yawns behind me with tunnels
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| The pinkest sky I’d ever seen
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| Still pocked with dirigibles
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| And flying machines that opened up
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| I thought it’d begun hailing but amethyst and glass
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| Were raining down from an unmarked aircraft
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| Covering the cooling tar totally
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| In manufactured street sheen
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| I’ve been finding clipped-off Parliaments everywhere lately
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| I take it as a sign that you’re around
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| See Jane passed away
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| For the first time in June
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| And the last time last night in the Warren
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| As a warm, round, mournful sound
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| Flooded my room
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| Like blood does from the faucets of pitch-black bathrooms during adolescent
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| summoning rituals |