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1. |
Keepskilling
04:31
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Something we all do
Something we all do keeps killing us now
And we know how
Something big that's far away
Something small that's quite nearby
Can be arranged in such a way
As to appear a similar size.
If you knew the day you'd die
And it was ten years from today
It might seem a similar size to a friend who moved away.
We do it in the depths of the nightmare.
We do it in the pith of the day.
We do it with mysterious weakness
And amazing grace.
I'd like to think we know at least enough to know we're wrong.
I'd like to say something that made me feel that I belong.
We trace it into the brains of our cities
We sow it in a monster's regret
We drip it into the brains of our children
It hasn't happened yet.
I'd like to think we might agree to live the way we die.
I'd like to think that honesty is not what makes the lie.
Something big that's far away
Something small that's quite nearby
Can be arranged in such a way
As to appear a similar size.
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2. |
Brutal Petunia
04:06
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When she walks downtown to the club on a Saturday night, he tries to tell her what her loving is for;
When she beats him down with a pipe on a Saturday night, nobody tells her what she couldn't afford and there's a bloodstained hand
Sliding in the rain down the windowpane and as the blood
Runs out, it's making little ruby rivers of Saturday now.
She walks this way, doesn't care about their words anymore; she's finally feeling like a person again
It was a sickness painting lines on what you had to divide, 'til you decide it's something different then;
Then you've got two new kinds
Of people you're unable to reconcile
So she equips herself
As if she doesn't even know the prevailing style.
She likes to speak with someone who
believes the things she knows.
She makes a mess inside, she doesn't stand there and cry,
She isn't waiting for the hammer to fall;
She takes a step outside and thinks a lot about the wonderful lives of all the people that her mother would call--
She'd be beside herself;
She'd never learn away to negotiate
And so it keeps her well
To remember every reason to celebrate herself.
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3. |
Editorial Discretion
04:39
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Movies are a way of deferring your now,
Though it seems like you're working on yourself somehow.
Hawthorn boughs and communion bread,
Moonlit miles in your snowbound bed,
Every place you create or remember is an antidote for what you would like to deny:
The ones you love are too far away,
And one day, you'll die.
A story is a way of correcting the truth.
It says more about you now than it explains about your youth.
Whatever might have happened then,
The words you choose now can amend;
Every time you tell it differently something new begins to happen behind you in time--
And it changes the present,
And you change your mind.
Stir up a cloud of fiction and settle in;
The slightest hint of friction, and it's relocation again.
(anything to keep you distracted)
I just want a distraction, so I can move on--
(anything to keep you distracted)
I just want a distraction, until I'm gone.
I wonder if I'm really a person at all.
I really haven't done that much and there's no one to call.
The ones I cared for most are done
Believing that I'm anyone
And I wonder if I'll ever be enough for me to leave me alone when I'm tired;
If I'm really in charge of myself,
I'm fired.
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4. |
Cruel Diagram
03:58
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5. |
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I could never disappear for anyone but you.
I wouldn't have the fortitude to make myself pass through.
You must believe you can; though others cannot understand
what vanishing requires, to do--
It happens all the time when you don't try
You're coming with me as I
Force myself into the blue.
I could never picture what was happening inside
All the blessed geniuses who perfectly provide
Pockets full of rain,
Elegance in explanation
Hideous and brave, besides
I have just one flame that I must hide
And I could show you,
But you'd tell me it was just a lie.
Many people live through torture;
Many people live through pain.
The legend is embossed into your brain
But you can't stand to live this way
You have to make yourself the same
You have to make yourself the same.
Some say Jesus comes to meet them,
Some say we don't know.
Some say there's an analogue
For every place we go-
A parallel in dreams,
A heaven in the seams of living,
glistening between the screams;
Glimpsed between the gears of a machine
And I could show you,
But you'd have to make yourself believe.
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6. |
Monument Man
04:11
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It took him months to achieve the design.
And all of the papers were filed on time.
Work began,
Blasting the stone into hymns and candlelight.
Near the end, everyone told him he'd lost his mind.
Nobody knew what to do with the hole.
Like all other absence that can't be controlled.
Mother said maybe they'd like it in Paris or someplace like that.
Father said, it's just a ditch you can fill it right in where it's at.
Bring your machines around
And fill in his negative space.
We've got to smooth this out,
Lest absence be taken for grace.
How can a person be proud of a taking-away--
An achievement for thieves and decay?
Society stands on a monument, not on a loss (save for the kind on a cross).
Now he's a man in a diner like you.
Who gives no impression of trying-to-do.
Even so, he's concocted a story as false as it is real.
Knowing him is knowing a fiction that hides all the while it reveals.
Maybe he'll die and they'll give him a stone...
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7. |
The Moses of The Ether
04:11
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8. |
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Everybody knows someone important,
Has an angel on which to rely;
There is something everybody (but me) understands,
And I won't understand before I die.
Some people build a cathedral
That takes more than one lifetime to complete.
When they're gone, their children carry on.
The fruits of their labor go unseen.
Everybody has someone to talk to;
Has someone who knows what it means.
There is something everybody (but me) understands;
It makes me jealous and faithless and mean.
There is something everybody (but me) understands.
And I don't even know what I've seen
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9. |
Oldworld
04:57
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Phone call, take another picture off the wall
Slip a note inside the frame, hang it just a bit this way...
White lies, stories nearly five denials high--
you'll have to go inside your dream,
walk the meaning back to me.
Every time the world goes still
And the ferns around you swell,
Making you a creature now
Following the path around,
Can you smell the stream?
Is the water of your dream something of a message now,
Something of a script borne out?
What has happened in your oldworld?
What's continuing to bind you?
Hide you from me?
Day dawns, fissures in the bricks around your home
Convince you there was something here
Until you feel it drawing hear.
I tried getting the coordinates to slide
Backward into where you sleep
But the rift was far too deep
Can you show me how
If the fates would not allow
I wonder could you show me how
Can you show me tonight
Pick a place inside your light
I wonder could you show me tonight
Could you show me tonight?
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10. |
The Liberties
03:22
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Why do you say these things again tonight?
Why do you need my pain to stay alive?
How does your world get better if we hit each other?
How does your world get brighter if we hate each other
How?
Does it make you tall?
Does it multiply your numbers, make you very
Rich
And wanted,
Rich,
Pursued by
Everyone lovely,
Granting eternal
Life: what a sparkling life.
I'm paying you.
I'm paying you to do the things I tell you to.
I'm paying you.
I'm paying you to do the things I won't.
I'm paying you.
Not because I want to but because I love you all.
And if you don't like that,
I suppose I'll have to carry on alone.
And if you don't like that,
I suppose you'll have to carry on alone.
Why should I wait out here
While you go in there?
Why should I hide my fear
When you're running scared, how
Does your bed get softer if we start another
Fight; does your bath run hotter if we kill each other? Why
Does it make you sing?
Does it make the mountains and meadows echo your song of
Self? Do you make yourself? Does it take
The love of the lessor, father confessor?
Life: what a sparkling life.
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11. |
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Why are you making that noise,
Why are you starting that machine?
I can hear it in my bones.
I can hear it in my dreams.
And are you starving that child
While you're arguing with me,
and is your anger too loud,
to hear the rest of us scream?
You need to see it in the news, now, don't you?
It's the only way you can take my word for anything
In this world.
You need to see it in the big bold letters,
handed down from the mouths of the only ones you'll believe.
Go on and cripple my voice,
Go on and call my bluff,
Go on and baffle my mathematics
So I can never add up
Go on and call me a name
Go on and make me a child
Go on and terrify my pain
Until it can't sing out.
Even as light makes darkness flee,
Did you think you could trap that ghost in me?
You're expecting to revise my memory,
But I'm free-I'm too free.
Can you cancel my past?
Can you revise my will?
Can you edit my experience?
Can you metabolize my pill?
Can you inhabit my mind?
Can you control my gait?
Can you suicide my soul
To keep your narrative straight?
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12. |
Enemies
05:04
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I met our childhood enemy the other day;
He said he had something to show me.
He led me back the long road to his father's house;
We found his father in the library, drinking.
I knew his father always hated my people;
I was embarrassed when he stood up to greet me.
He put his hand on my shoulder and apologized.
I thought that he would never stop crying.
I asked our enemy on the ride back home
If there was something I'd forgotten:
He said our childhood was a certain kind of act
And I was trapped in a vanishing proscenium.
When you try too hard, you'll find--you're surrounded by old enemies.
Faces soft and kind, memories of better days
When we used to fight, but it didn't mean a thing.
Let's go back tonight, let's recover everything.
Now all your wives and husbands
Can't relate to what you've been through
'Cause they have an understanding
Built on the worlds they grew up against.
But we conducted our lives on a secret stage;
All of our actions had a double meaning
Read from a script nobody else could know about
We learned the finer points of secret-keeping
My best friend's wife believes it's just depression
(how do we help him break through?)
He sits and stares sometimes and we can't reach him
(what do you think he might do?)
Sometimes I can't complete a conversation....
At first I was quick to get my feelings hurt;
It took me some time to get used to it.
It's only later I found out that it was all for show
And no one really meant a thing they were saying.
Even so there was something really valuable there;
The hate and friendship were so much simpler
Without the messy complications of their real equivalents
It was a life I could not just abandon...
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13. |
But, Happiness
02:42
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A pickled eye, a petri dish.
A map of Africa, the journal of a witch.
A water clock, a pewter bird,
Encyclopedias of the absurd.
I furnish you, you furnish me-
We furnish houses in each other constantly
I redesign your living space,
You put the picture in the other place
The place where people never say the things they see,
And I can't get these living spaces out of me.
But happiness is something strange:
No dusty moth collection, made to rearrange.
Made to rearrange.
Made to rearrange.
Made to rearrange.
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14. |
Don't Worry
03:52
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This is my ship; I've been waiting to sail her home--
Tell me you didn't know
She'll be the witness to all I come to own;
Even her power is gold.
And when we open the world...I'm not alone in the world...
Isn't she lovely as life, now, Harry?
We had a problem although we were very small--maybe too small to see.
Nobody told us it had to be resolved
Or else it would always be.
And as we grew in the world
It settled through in the world--
You know, I think of it all afternoon now, Harry...
Some things are meant to hurt--
To stop you from cutting the nerve completely.
It doesn't matter what you think you deserve,
If you bear what you care about
Most discreetly...
We shared a secret one night between the pines; something that couldn't be said.
It silently sealed itself halfway between our minds;
Maybe that halfway is dead.
And now I sail for a shore
I thought was buried before
And I simply can't take you along, now, Harry.
If you forget me I hope it's for the best. Maybe one day you can dream.
And you can enjoy what it means without distress --
The morning will come, you will see.
You'll walk as solid as day
Until you're well on your way--
And I'll have been gone seven years, now, Harry.
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Ortega Fuerte Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Ortega Fuerte are a group of songwriters and multi-instrumentalists founded in 2003 by core member Hugo Grayling and often including the contributions of Air Anchor's Chris Rohlf.
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