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lyrics

The air is thick with aspirations dying,
their corpses piling like the charnel heap
of midges dusting the base of my lamp.
Sullen and molten, metamorphic in decay,
I don’t wish for winter,
the sere chap of snow,
vistas white on white on white
until your eyes turn skullward for the late-night horror show.
Nor do I plead for the sublime soothing coolness
of dry grass, fragrant dry grass and fallen leaves
vaulting and twisting over it, wind
the decisive force of nature moving everything,
thought and fact and vacant desiderata,
to the next resting place.
I only wish for peace.
That long lasting silence—peace.
No more crickets. Not another frog.
An end to foul-mouthed invisible birds.
Never again heat compressing my ears
like the slow burn of a jet.
(Did Vincent die like this, in a swelter?
When he whacked off his ear had the cicadas begun their song?)
Breathing is difficult.
The air is a hot pool from Dante
and the damned scream as they grasp at Charon’s boat…
Mosquitoes swim to me
as if in a viscous matrix of their own design.
They almost float, followed by a wake
that rolls across the room,
breaking against my books,
sending bleak shimmering reflections
of a bare incandescent bulb.
Breathing is difficult.
The air drips down the walls,
pours down my body into a hot pool.
Breathing is difficult.
The voices of night, the desperate multitude,
the shrill stream of every hunger.
That long lasting silence—peace.
Breathing is difficult.
There is no peace.

credits

from 20 Years Frozen for All Time, released March 5, 2016

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about

swampmessiah Saint Paul, Minnesota

I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1957. I've been drawing all my life and painting since about 1975; I started writing poetry and rants in, maybe, 1976; since 1996 I've been recording those poems and rants, usually with a "musical" backing.
I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My partner and I have two children. I have a day job that is in no way artistic.
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