Your Skinny Legs [lyrics by Joshua McLerran]

I can’t see
Your skinny legs
Your skinny legs
Dancin’ ‘round the room no more

And I can’t see
Your skinny legs
Dancin’ ‘round the room no more
Dancin’ ‘round the room no more

I’d give it all up
Just to see your smile
Dancin’ ‘round the room once more
Dancin’ ‘round the room once more

But everywhere I walk around here I see nothing that reminds me that I’m anything
But sitting here alone
Everywhere I look, I see quiet pieces of my soul
That used to have your name on them but now they are no more

I can see your eyes at every turn
Deep inside my soul, they sting and burn
They sting and burn
I cut
Out
All
The pain.

[breathe]

If I had a moment, love, I’d treat you like a queen
I’d lose myself no more, my love, oh I’d do anything
Just to feel your breath again inside my weighted room
Just to see your eyes go dancing

[breathe]

Not spinning round the room




.

Describing the Emptiness

The silence was deafening. I could feel it intensify as it wrapped around the room and headed toward me like a train, ready not just to knock me down, but to completely obliterate me. I was intensely aware of the nothingness I had become and by which I was now surrounded. I no longer wished to deny myself this emptiness, so I embraced it, acknowledging the hole it left within me. I looked forward to the sadness that I knew was sure to come, as it would then at least be something that I could feel. But the sadness would not come, and I was left with only emptiness. An emptiness so familiar and unwelcoming. An emptiness... such emptiness... such emptiness within.

Claire

She bore the efforts of dreams with the determination of one who believes in the subtle realities couched within them.

The Bones

The knowledge of humanity is enclosed within my one and stinking eye.
Completely sheltering graveyards of the unsung alibis
Who always called my name out last, within their dying droves
To shit before they eat, my friends, and all of it: my bones

Nothing More

Sometimes when the desert moon closes
Its one and giant eye
I fall into an image of myself
Upturned by something less than ethereal

A portion of my languid tone
Against the fallen sky-clouds
Is my only claim to fame tonight
A teardrop in a less than perfect world

I create myself indelible
Upon the echoes of my past
Where I, upturned, infallible
Am more than anything, less real

A shoulder left to cry upon
My only calling claim
Is nothing more than nothing more
Then Nothing More: my name

A Ghost & Gone for Good (or Multi-faceted Subterranialism)

Sitting beneath the hum of a thousand watts of fake and fluorescent oil and concrete-scented light, I long for the sweet breath of the Metro winds, reminding me of the world I left above me: a world filled with hope and dreams and movement. Not the silent sheltered graveyard that this tunneled tomb is to me. A carriage comes with screeching grating wheels and a hundred placid faces staring out, each visage torn by the silent hopelessness that this tomb of motion builds within us all. I watch as the elephant-sized steel caterpillar stops and gapes its sideways maw at me, welcoming me to its compartmentalizing hell; laughing with its pre-recorded voice of instructions, like a robot that cannot feel. I step into the guts of the beast and lose my soul with all the other wearied travelers, as I await the sweet release that its closing jaws had promised me. But deep within its belly now, I find that no release will come to me. Instead, there are only new and older smells, more human and grotesque in their complexities. I scoff at the idea that I could have once considered this new world with all its perplexities and all its swallowed lives as anything close to better than the frightened and yet docile life I left behind. I shudder as I discover that my kindness and my thoughtful nature and my conscientious ideals that encourage progress in a human life all mean nothing here. My skin grows pale as I feel the silence of the void, enticing me to become one of these lost souls. I clam up, deep within myself, becoming silent in my heart, as the thought approaches me in fear and a kind of frolicking cold mayhem, that perhaps I've always been one of these pale zombies: dead wanderers in a world of steely grey, enticing others toward the void. But just as those thoughts emerge, just as the light within the tunnel of my mind grows dim to the point of patent blindness, I hear the robot voice again: "Hollywood & Vine," it says, as I stumble through its maw, returning to the thousand watts of fake fluorescent air without that is still somehow within. I feel the solidity of the concrete and immovable ground beneath my feet and wonder, had I stayed another minute there, alone within the belly of that beast, would I have found myself turned to one of those lost souls: a ghost and gone for good?