1. |
Young Pros
05:05
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If I could just explain myself, I never meant to hurt you at all. I just turned around, around for a second, and you ended up taking the fall. Now I will put my name on your cast, and I will bring you grapes every day. I’ll walk the two miles to the hospital ward and I’ll say what you want me to say.
That all my friends are growing up now, getting hitched and having kids, that I know that the party’s up now for ten year plans and mortgages. That I’ll learn to love my desk and drawers, that I’ll find a way to finance my loss, that I’ll file away my fuzzy heart in a catalogue full of blank cards.
And when the fractures heal enough I’ll be there to wheel you home. We’ll stage a fight that night in the kitchen and you still won’t be able to sleep alone. I’ll drink until I’m calm and I’m dull, I’ll keep a blackness safe in my chest. I’ll find anger in the angles of the work surfaces and you’ll pretend it doesn’t exist.
That all our friends are growing up now, getting hitched and having kids, that I know that the party’s up now for ten year plans and mortgages.
We’ll define ourselves by our salaries, and you’ll once a month ask what’s up with me. We will share a bed but keep separate hearts. I will find a way to finance my loss.
And all the safety comes on like an addiction at night, we feed the vein and close our eyes. Because we’re safe and we’re secure on 22 grand a year, and doing fuck all with our lives until we’re both somnambulists and we can’t tell through all the things we lost that we’re still here.
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2. |
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I guess I’m gonna have to ask you to bear with me, ‘cause I heard your attention span is ripping at the seams. It’s funny, that, because I coulda sworn you devoured all the heavy books I used to pride myself on when I was a greasy kid and I was sad, and I needed someone else’s art to use as a kind of badge to say ‘hey, this guy might be worth a shit,’ but we both know you never really needed that.
‘Cause you were swinging from treetops while I shinned up the trunk and never made the branches, but we laughed and we got drunk on Carling in a carpark out back of our old house. I could still be doing that now, and I think that’s alright, and I think we’re alright.
I heard you became a bit preoccupied with fear, but that you caught a plane for the best part of every year to an island where you lived alone, but maybe bravery has changed and it now takes more guts to stay at home. And no, neither of us are psychiatrists, but you’ve seen me at my worst so I hope you think I know a little bit about that sickened percentage that numbs a sunlit day and nudges nights into wasted. So what say I make you a deal? You can keep on talking whenever you feel ill and I’ll listen with a pair of interested ears if you’ll still pull me back from these cliffs. I think I’ll be alright, and I think we’ll be alright.
We both know you’re not the world’s cup of Joe. But you’ve got me speaking in puns, the serious man who wouldn’t know fun if it shot him in the leg, and I think that’s worth something. So you keep running that show. Cricket and Pinocchio, we’re still laughing.
I saw two cats born and I watched two cats die. Now there’s a town of the fuckers that’s burst up into life, so don’t you ever dare fucking apologise. He’s not normally alright. We are great and you are always alright.
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3. |
Bluebird
03:00
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I’m an effigy of sleepless rust, I shiver code up at the ceiling. We’ve siphoned off the last of it. Oh God, what have I done? I thought I was invincible and I thought that I could handle this. I’ve done a number on myself, while in the dark the room pitches and swells. Oh well.
Well I’ve hollowed out my insides darling, I thought that I could handle this. Now I’m ducking beneath windowsills and hiding from the neighbours. I am dodging like a boxer past the shadows in a vacant room to kid myself believing that I’m half as strong as what else is in here too. Well fuck you.
It’s the reverse of what the old man said. The outside’s a bluebird, but inside’s dead.
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4. |
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I am eating only apples just like that song used to go, and I’m knocking back these vitamins like I’m living for tomorrow. I take calls and do my best to help the caller out, and there’s four figures on my paycheck when the new month comes around. The fist around my lungs is loose so I can breathe a little more, I still spit pink into the sink but I don’t think I grind my jaw. My fears and sins pale in the arms of the girl I lay beside. How could I be anything but hopeful with so much time left ‘til I die, and I don’t think about you anymore?
I drag my body through the chlorine at least a couple times a week. I don’t drink bourbon anymore, and I don’t find it hard to sleep. I’m smiling all the time ‘cause everyone’s my friend, and I’m working to improve myself and I smoke less on the weekend. When I wake up in the morning I jump right out of bed and hit the street with dancing feet and sunshine overhead. When the medicine cabinet’s empty I just feel so fucking free, and through the flecks of toothpaste the bathroom mirror lies to me.
Says “I don’t think about you anymore.”
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5. |
The Mondays
03:53
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I’ve become a presentee, I’m a pilgrim cold on the weekday mornings, and I heard that you’re throwing bedsheets into the hotel pool. I’ve been getting sick off the A.C. but you’ll laugh it off when you’re home for a week and cashing out for both our habits, while I roll over tapped out and dumb. No longer so young.
I’m getting used to seeing your face on the posters on the Underground walls, and I hear you necking Dexedrine across the ocean. I could never carry it like you, I been throwing up, I been blacking out and then I’m back at my desk at 8am on the Mondays, treading water, screaming “stop doing this to yourself, because you’re never gonna last the next few blasts without your precious mental health, oh stop doing this to yourself, ‘cause now you fade out of the room and it ends too soon and all your redoses are creeping closer and closer…”
Do you remember about the time you bought that house, before you painted, and had us all round to get fucked up? And at the calm in the eye of the party, alone in your backyard on a pallet smoking, you turned and said to me:
“I don’t know just how the fuck we ended up like this, contract phones and credit cards and expensive amphetamines and 9 to 5 and 5 a day and 8 hours in your bed most nights. I guess I ain’t complaining…”
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NOT GOSPEL London, UK
2 friends. Happy songs about being sad.
Booking:
notgospelband@gmail.com
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