1. |
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The great pacifier,
complementarian wrecking ball through grandma’s living room
covered in idols and slogans to make sense of
this Wild West
It was you who pulled the trigger
It wasn’t you who tore the flesh
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2. |
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Shepherd, applying pressure.
Availability is service.
Urge us to worship your body
like Christ,
and give you ours like a tithe.
You’re a magnet to a television.
You’re a vacuum to our swollen hearts.
Your 3 AM charisma strains all our colors
into the flat tint of your glass eye.
Cover us.
Eye line to centerstage.
We celebrate the restraint.
This holy pipeline amplifies the profane.
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3. |
Lobby
02:12
|
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I’ve waited the day away,
candle to covenant.
The heavy weight of nothing balanced on my chest.
The wind blows over as it does the grass.
Setting house fires to taunt fate.
Re-bleeding every doorway.
And the ghost won’t move.
Elohim will have us wait
to finish his cigarette in this autumn blizzard.
Promises are a revolving door
to a dim cellar where damp bones hang to dry
atop a guilted gravity and a sharp hunger
that won’t be erased.
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4. |
Strobe Light Shadow Play
02:14
|
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Entertained and drained,
we look where we’re led
and lose our heads again.
Held down, in love
in awe
in bed
with afterimages.
You rear your head.
High priest demands a coup.
Let his wrath loose.
You grip the wheel.
All hail this insidious car wreck.
We’re breathing it all in:
the toxins, their futures
with interest.
The curtain lifts.
The steel twists.
The petrol pours.
The wind shifts.
The fire breaks.
The curtain lights.
The stage burns.
We applaud.
Self-immolate.
The rhetoric replays.
Flames paint a steel-toed grin and an empty grace.
You’re not a martyr -
You’re a congregant with a match.
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5. |
Genuflect
01:46
|
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Listen to the tape recorder,
face down on the floor.
A warm voice prostrates.
Listen to his consonants
pressing your face to his breath,
binding broken skin.
This drying wind is lotion.
Tertiary nails in tunnel vision
ground and breathed into young lungs -
suffocating the rest of their lives.
Placed where you arrived -
the beaten path of the evangelized.
Arthritic for the rest of their lives.
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6. |
Comparator
01:01
|
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Lurch through binoculars into the neighbors’ windows.
Paths under microscopes like a thief in the night.
Reduced to blinking lights.
Swallow statistics incubated.
Data recreated.
It’s a race into a brick wall.
Amnesia, a signing under duress.
All I am is what I’ve done.
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7. |
The 99
01:51
|
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With branded new spades, probe the limits.
Strip the fossils of their teeth.
One small step for the avant garde.
One giant misfire for mankind.
Bodies circle down, their heads still in the clouds:
lubricated and elastic.
Heaven’s interlocutor,
the god’s suggest a restart
for this trash collector rusted through.
Look what our hands have done, so cut them off.
Board the catapult giving bereavement wings.
Let the bones of 1,000 mechanics lift you higher,
ever higher.
We’ll tell the world.
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8. |
Guzzler
01:53
|
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Kids playing truck stop
insert their futures into vending machines.
The now springs like a fountain
when you can buy everything.
Before the black spots pierce through.
Before the stitches loose.
Kids playing truck stop
offer caffeinated strain to fill in blind spots.
Refill to relace the webs our peripheries create.
We don’t think if we don’t stop
pacing the aisles in this maze of
options: display cases
refracting
There’s nothing to hold on to,
and it’s bleeding through
the thin film on our eyes
like ink blots on paper
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9. |
45th and Amelia
02:12
|
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New paint and new drapes,
but time won’t melt.
It haunts like headless horsemen.
We’re intruding on our histories,
circling the front lawn.
Eras collide and kick back.
They’ll bury us if we don’t leave
and wash our memories.
They’ll bottle us inside this stale world they keep.
We weren’t us then and we aren’t us now.
Low blimp looms over this small town,
casts a shadow like the face of god.
It’s the end.
It’s always the end.
They’ll bury us if we don’t leave
and wash our memories.
They’ll bottle us inside this stale world they keep.
We weren’t us then and we aren’t us now.
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10. |
Acolytic
02:19
|
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This erasure, this sleight of hand.
Thick pen’s retreating steps,
watermarked and backlogged
like hope’s tongue depressor -
the sharp sting of pine on splintered gums.
Pray with broken nails.
Deacons disposing Luminol.
I’ve lost my taste for love.
Reprieve me of idyllic retreats
and their crash tests.
The catapult in my head expands the cave in my chest.
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11. |
Heel Marks
01:42
|
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40 years and we’ve never left this place.
Motion’s stalling - it’s promised to
in these flood light planes.
There’s no safety net for this tight rope walk through fog.
Wind shifts left to chance,
the elements cast lots upon our backs.
The voices pulling down, but I won’t let them go.
Their hands around my throat.
I’m hoarding all their words, but I can’t let them go.
Swallowing until we choke.
The mission shows no restraint
and they’re coming for everything.
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12. |
End Scene
02:11
|
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Satan hopes for a hole in the canoe
like genes he’d impart
to fishing lines winding home.
Paying for my sins of sloth and critique.
The surreal refers bones to wildfire.
Every day was malleable, but now the plastic cracks in my hands.
And it marks the end.
Wait, I’ve got a case of imposter syndrome gnawing at my door.
We’ve reached the other side
in unforgiving light.
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Lower Automation Illinois
Noise-adjacent mathpunk from Illinois.
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