| I never swung a wooden sword
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| At slow bees…
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| Kept something dying in a box beneath
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| A bed my father’s father built neath me…
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| Never fed a mare honey nor seed from my hands
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| Or held a harp…
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| These things would melt me
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| And then, they would have wung me…
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| Doth the dark precede you
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| Or simply punk you near ledge, treasure, and lover
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| In your swift and ample
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| Doth You stay this sort of motherfucker…
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| You were amiss before stained glass
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| Its punishments never pointed at you
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| Yet you held on bare legs the news paper
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| Cured body of a deadened cat
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| Below a porch beside a boulevard
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| And in all that softening dark
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| You would return to see it’s sucked flesh
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| Pulled by days of dirt and degrade from the gentle
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| Center of its lower jaw…
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| And you saw
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| All that was soft to it now had left…
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| Only Eyeholes, claw and cracking flesh
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| And it was beautiful before you…
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| Made you cry and beg for what the day entrusts you…
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| Made you cry and harden
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| Finally you’d been given answers you could understand…
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| You in the lowlight
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| It in the dark
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| The coal below all rules and human hides…
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| Blew white before you in your boyhood…
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| As you made a pact with depths that you could never make with other children…
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| It’s become dead cat clear
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| I strap no gat to bring the sun back…
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| Yet you never pet tarantula by blacklight, by a knife collection…
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| Never took your father’s belt across your face…
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| Mother’s disease into your breast…
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| And were you asked at such young age, to spend a year of weeks
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| Beneath the earth asleep beside either of your grandfathers gone,
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| you would have…
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| They say the first year of decomposition is most noticeable
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| Much like and infant quickens to its future self…
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| And you would talk to their husks in the wheeze of your sleep child chest
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| And give them grace as they fall to a simpler thing
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| Of compounds and languaglessness…
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| Where things are slowed
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| Respectfully
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| Respectively…
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| Where clear it goes…
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| Tonguing a loose tooth for the blood taste from your gums
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| Thinking in child alchemy, free of your sum, free of your numbs
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| Your eyes grinding light from the dark’s slights
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| Weaving what’s leaking through the porch wood into sight…
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| When last you met your pet with death
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| You slipped two triple A’s into its brittle throat.
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| Wrapped it in newer news print with your hopes…
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| And buried it forever
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| In a ply of fading press and yankee boxscores or…
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| As forever
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| As decomposition takes it… |