dreamattack | a dialogue in pictures

I see through your thin cotton dress
I don’t know if we’ll get dressed
so pull by that store parking lot
you know I’ve missed your lots
warn me of the cans and knots

I don’t need a house in Lake Michigan
I don’t need a purpose to plan within
I just want to feel your pulse again

downtown the exits just around
can’t you smell our future good and well?
I’ll take you upstairs show you my bed and things
share all my thoughts and cares

here is my heart here is my soul
you pushed me past my lonely door
you are my everything

september a time of in betweens
lazy month of nothing
all rainy gutters rushing

they’re all true
all the good things you say
will they all pass
quit like the clouds today?

they’ll be there in your pretty dreams
all full of colour and sense of things
you blow breath of life in me

I felt this way the night before
you pulled me from this heavy floor
you are my everything
you are my everything

michigan / red house painters

This is the definition of my life
Lying in bed in the sunrise
Choking on a vitamin tablet the doctor gave
In the hope of saving me
In the hope of saving me

Mott’s in the corner of the room
Junkyard fool with eyes of [glue/gloom/blue]
I asked him time again,

Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain,
Take me in and dry the rain,
The rain, the rain, the rain, the rain, my rain now

Dusty brown boots in the corner by the ironing board
Spray-on dust is the greatest thing
Sure is the greatest thing
Since the [light/lie], since the [light/lie]

Mott’s in the corner of the room
Junkyard fool with eyes of [glue/gloom/blue]
I asked him time again

Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
The rain, the rain, the rain, the rain, my rain now

I asked him time again,
Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
Take me in and dry the rain
The rain, the rain, the rain, the rain, my rain now

If there’s something inside that you wanna say
Say it out loud it’ll be okay
I will be alright, I will be alright
I will be your light, I will be your light

If there’s something inside that you wanna say
You can say it out loud it will be okay
I will be alright, I will be your light
I will be your light, I will be your light

I need love
I need love

dry the rain / the beta band

so many little things followed me
so many little things that bothered me
but I found my answer
from all the chaos that followed me I have found my answer
I’ve told you before don’t follow me because I am not your answer

I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
these are the words I say to myself everyday
I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
tell me what ritual I should have today
but I’m not alone
I’ve resolved so many things and set myself free

I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
the words I say to myself every day
I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
such a stupid ritual to have to say to myself everyday
I’m not alone but I found my answer and set myself free
I’m not unhappy

I’m not alone and I’m not unhappy
not alone and I’m not unhappy
I’m not afraid and I’m not unhappy

I’m not afraid
I’m not afraid
I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
these are the words I say to myself everyday
I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
I’m not afraid

I am not alone
I am not afraid
I’m not unhappy
the words I say to myself everyday
I am not alone
I am not afraid
I am not unhappy
such a stupid ritual to have to say to myself everyday
I’m not alone but I found my answer and set myself free
I’m not unhappy

fearless / vnv nation

“How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a
spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take
it by the spectral throat?”

— Joseph Conrad

For the Year of the Insane

a prayer

O Mary, fragile mother,
hear me, hear me now
although I do not know your words.
The black rosary with its silver Christ
lies unblessed in my hand
for I am the unbeliever.
Each bead is round and hard between my fingers,
a small black angel.
O Mary, permit me this grace,
this crossing over,
although I am ugly,
submerged in my own past
and my own madness.
Although there are chairs
I lie on the floor.
Only my hands are alive,
touching beads.
Word for word, I stumble.
A beginner, I feel your mouth touch mine.

I count beads as waves,
hammering in upon me.
I am ill at their numbers,
sick, sick in the summer heat
and the window above me
is my only listener, my awkward being.
She is a large taker, a soother.
The giver of breath
she murmurs,
exhaling her wide lung like an enormous fish.

Closer and closer
comes the hour of my death
as I rearrange my face, grow back,
grow undeveloped and straight-haired.
All this is death.
In the mind there is a thin alley called death
and I move through it as
through water.
My body is useless.
It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet.
It has given up.
There are no words here except the half-learned,
the Hail Mary and the full of grace.
Now I have entered the year without words.
I note the queer entrance and the exact voltage.
Without words they exist.
Without words one may touch bread
and be handed bread
and make no sound.

O Mary, tender physician,
come with powders and herbs
for I am in the center.
It is very small and the air is gray
as in a steam house.
I am handed wine as a child is handed milk.
It is presented in a delicate glass
with a round bowl and a thin lip.
The wine itself is pitch-colored, musty and secret.
The glass rises on its own toward my mouth
and I notice this and understand this
only because it has happened.

I have this fear of coughing
but I do not speak,
a fear of rain, a fear of the horseman
who comes riding into my mouth.
The glass tilts in on its own
and I am on fire.
I see two thin streaks burn down my chin.
I see myself as one would see another.
I have been cut int two.

O Mary, open your eyelids.
I am in the domain of silence,
the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper.
There is blood here.
and I have eaten it.
O mother of the womb,
did I come for blood alone?
O little mother,
I am in my own mind.
I am locked in the wrong house.

– Anne Sexton

Live

Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

Well, death’s been here
for a long time –
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart’s doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother,
the damn bitch!

Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody’s doll.

Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don’t like to be told
that you’re sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.

Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize –
and you realize she does this daily!
I’d known she was a purifier
but I hadn’t thought
she was solid,
hadn’t known she was an answer.
God! It’s a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchins,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I’m on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I’m ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.

Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I’m an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn’t break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I’m as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches’ gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.

O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn’t take.
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

– Anne Sexton

Self in 1958

What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
upon some shellacked and grinning person,
eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?
I have hair, black angel,
black-angel-stuffing to comb,
nylon legs, luminous arms
and some advertised clothes.

I live in a doll’s house
with four chairs,
a counterfeit table, a flat roof
and a big front door.
Many have come to such a small crossroad.
There is an iron bed,
(Life enlarges, life takes aim)
a cardboard floor,
windows that flash open on someone’s city,
and little more.

Someone plays with me,
plants me in the all-electric kitchen,
Is this what Mrs. Rombauer said?
Someone pretends with me -
I am walled in solid by their noise -
or puts me upon their straight bed.
They think I am me!
Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend!
They pry my mouth for their cups of gin
and their stale bread.

What is reality
to this synthetic doll
who should smile, who should shift gears,
should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder,
and have no evidence of ruin or fears?
But I would cry,
rooted into the wall that was once my mother,
if I could remember how
and if I had the tears.

– Anne Sexton

woke up sobbing in an empty bed, far from home
reaching for you
reaching for your arms, your chest, your mouth, your smell
reaching for the gentle and certain way you move my body to fit yours
reaching for the comfort of your mind brushing back mine
reaching for you

and the ache, the ache follows me like a shadow