Lyrics

Apathy it is time to die (the time hath now come for thee to seek the Path [in reality]). Your breathing is about to cease. (Thy guru hath) you are set (thee) face to face before the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience in its Reality in the Bardo state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like unto a transparent vacuum without circumference or center. At this moment, know thou thyself-, and abide in that state.

I came here 12 boxes on an Amtrak train
My car left a corpse in a Chicago parking lot
Holding a fist full of too late love letters
I barely noticed the hills or the blue sky
or the vastness of space between.

I came here to rid my self of myself
of the cash register ring of Kinko?s copies
of the "Hey honey" comments of cowboy hat wearin?
policeman, contractors and low end lawyers requesting "more fried okra please"
of the round and empty marble eyes of men who said "make it a double"
and "do you have a light?"
I always had one
I watched the flame extinguish on the match, smoke rise and curl in circles around cool desperate cigarettes,
I wanted to take the spent ash and press it to their foreheads
to call their souls back,
as if it were Ash Wednesday and I am asking them to give up their own death for Lent.

I wanted to run out into the streets of storm and clouds and shout
?save death for being dead?
run down Studemont past the bar doors,
past the grain silos, past the towers of smoke,
to the graveyard
where Stuart lay
with his crushed lungs
and arms like wings that took him soaring off the Corsicana cliff
into the unsuspecting valley
airlift to Tyler.

It took his lungs two months
to finally collapse under the weight of smoke and glass
Standing at the alter of his crushed lungs
scattering rose petals to the wind
I whisper a promise
?I will save death for being dead?.

The gray sky holds rain
and their eyes are gray marbles filled with smoke and rain
and their hands pass the time in 3 hour poker games
while spit cups overflow with pre-digested tobacco.

We have taken a ride out to the West side
where the volcanoes sit
distant protrusions
They sit quiet, surrounded by long dry grass moving in still waves.

This is where the earth spent its poison
threw its fist up in black boiling red raged anger and said
?get out of me that which does not serve me?
and threw liquid rock from its belly.

I am here,
with a handful of sky
and a promise to be alive.