1. |
Anacrusis
02:06
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Platinum light will melt and hide and bruises all will swell. Send me loving letters, I am warm at home in Hell. I will carry you to safety in the red mouth of a witch with white-hot metal lips that could cauterize if they knew how to kiss. So lay me on your table and stick me with your needle—I will sing about the glitter in the ugly and the evil. I will spiral as I tell you all the secrets of my sorrow. I will burst the clouds and bear the news that there is no tomorrow anymore.
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2. |
Heaven on Earth
02:49
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A thousand snakes wrapped in velvet hoods kiss me while I sleep, oh I know that I'm no good. You don't have to tell me anything. I am going to illuminate you. I'm gonna trace your worthless form in fire. I'm gonna burn you like the played-out disco record that you are. I'm gonna light you like a funeral pyre, and my heart is gonna sing, ''Love me while I bleed on this altar of ice and bones. I used to be invincible but now I’m broken, and I don't know where to go.” Pregnant with the ghost of an outdated machine who waits to spew all of its seeds between the drywall of your dreams and make a meal out of your butcher-papered heart. Somewhere damp and cold you're nursing acid from your wounds. You are crying out for
sleep, but sleep will never come for you. You live in constant fear of dying stars, just born to swallow everything, but nothing would be different, so what's one more catastrophe? Infinity vision blurring underneath the clouds. A hatchet made of flames couldn't turn this curse around. These words are hungry and they will feed until their guts explode. I will wrap you tight in sheets of lead and woven gold and I will cast you deep inside the soil where all bad bodies go. I will curl up on the loosened dirt and wave my crooked hands, and I will scratch your name into the earth and thank the swollen land. Let it rain down bags of sand. Death is just a stage, but a bloodbath first performance scared the audience away, and they are so afraid, the actors lock up all the doors, then they all forget their names 'cause no one's speaking anymore. Oh Shangri-La, I heard that you burned down. I saw all of your occupants as they came running out. They had stitches on their eyelids, they had blood in all their mouths. Will you tell me now what all of that's about?
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3. |
The Devil
02:38
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When the Devil gets inside your heart, She's gonna make you sing and shine like a star in the glooming night sky overhead, leading the way through the dark like a long gone friend who shows up just to tell you you're alone. And when the Devil gets inside your head, She's gonna make you dance and raise the dead just to ask them what it felt like to go, and how it feels to decompose into carbon and methane and oil. And when the Devil gets inside your lungs, you're gonna breathe in fire, and cough up blood as a sideshow act to the onlooking world that will flock to your wounds, but stay for your words and then say you were too bold or shy. And when the Devil gets inside your mouth, you're gonna write handsome poems that shimmer like flowers to win the heart of the one you love and you'll wet their lips with the Devil's tongue and they'll cry and tell you that they're sure that you're the one they've been waiting their whole life for.
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4. |
Entropy
03:16
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You cursed all good luck charms and dragged them through the streets, saying, ''There's no need for ritual, there is no need for sacraments like these,'' so I held a funeral for entropy, I bit my lip and held my breath, and when the fortune teller's blood ran down their forehead into their eyes, their disciples all made eye contact with death. Broken Promise Swallower, you are never far away, weak beneath the weight of light and insulated by the countless sting of days. Your heart was buried as the sun rose up. Putrid meat painted the blushingest of reds. The name of every arsonist is carved on a paraffin mausoleum. Once it melts, it then will all make perfect sense. Now I hear twin-talk from the shallowest of sleep, bitter whispering in stereo that says, “Angels all will feed their bones to me.” I fed my haloes their own innocence. When I woke up I felt so sick. One by one the oracles will breathe water into their lungs. One by one the oracles will all go limp.
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5. |
Altruism Algorithm
02:39
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One, two, three, four, I won't let your garbage-hexing lungs produce no more. Those plastic tablets slip down freezing cold and make your eyes so numb and your fingers all close around crystals of sugar so small you can't see them, and flowerettes so ugly only I would be caught sleeping beneath them. The season changes. The heart explodes. I vomit crocuses that germinated deep inside my throat. Light this house on fire, turn it into smoke, and watch it make out on the lawn with what it calls a ghost—and then the ticks and the termites who've slept in the walls will swim out in the hot morning fog. They will click and they'll hiss as a means to confirm what it is we've been so afraid of. They will swarm all the guilty and read them their charges, and punish them swiftly and brand them with justice, lay eggs in their stomachs to spill out their mouths, they will give all these bored people something fresh to talk about.
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6. |
What You've Got Coming
03:23
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Cross my heart and hope that death is just a dream of loneliness—wake up in the morning and feel ok. Blue curse braided in my skin, terrors ate my dream again, but growing mouths are always hungry. They say you're gonna get what you've got coming to you, baby. They say you're gonna get what you deserve. When that karmic reaper's got you running, there is no safety in this world. Red sun tearing at my blinds to get me up, if it's a joke then don't you think you've had enough? Your laugh is old, and it gets weaker every day. Why don't you rest, so I can sleep off all this hate? I've got an ocean filled with nightmares in my mouth, and no good place to spit it out. They say you're gonna get what you've got coming to you, baby. They say you're gonna get what you deserve. When that karmic reaper's got you running for your soul, there is no safety in this world. So watch the stars and count the days ’til arms will wrap as tight as braids. Your tongue will swell to fill your throat, and then you’ll go where everybody goes. Oh, don’t you want to go where everybody goes?
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7. |
Nightmare
04:20
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With a pen inside a notebook I wrote, “The end has got to come,” then I used my bad intentions to quench the morning sun. Now I wake up in the afternoon and I'm always bathed in blood. Am I a newborn? Am I a victim? Did I kill something hateful with my love? Or did I strangle something sacred for good luck? Am I just a cosmic spasm? Am I living on my knees? I had a vision, or a nightmare, or just an awful dream, where a mutilated animal laid writhing at my feet. She said, ''You broke my bones, now go break your own,'' and trumpets blared as she died in front of me. Will my back go weak, will I die beneath all this gravity wrongfully given to me? I burned the wood and stayed real warm, and consoled the dirt that sprouted all the trees. I heard a plot discussed so loudly that I had to grit my teeth. They said, “We’ll swallow all your pieces and carry them from sea to shining sea,'' then I woke up in a basement with a polygraph machine. I said, ''I have got some questions, and you had better answer them for me.” With roots deep in a soil that is rich and thick with pain, I will pry open my arid eyes and I will state my case. There are blossoms on the shadows in the desert in my brain where I've moved inside the Devil, and now you'll have to call me by my name. With the moon on top and the sun below will I lay down in this soil and rot alone? With this tongue of gold am I gonna choke on this kingdom made of flames and weathered stone? I was drowning in delusions, I was swimming through deceit, when I saw a population rotting right in front of me, and I looked down on my body, and I was rotting too. Then I was sealed into a catacomb lined with shimmering and decomposing truth where I saw a mirror image of a child with unhinged jaws whose hands tried to write poems, but the pen just scribbled flaws, and then a gasping planet got ground up into dust, and I swore it was a nightmare, but a nightmare goes away when you wake up.
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8. |
Sign of the Cross
02:02
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I could have been so beautiful, I could have shined like scattered broken glass, but you painted tar over my heart for you, one coat for every day that ever passed. Who put those pills inside my mouth, and laughed until I swallowed every one? Who giggled 'til I showed up demanding just a taste of their sweet blood? Those sad helpless pleas will not save you when I'm looking you dead in the eye, but if it makes you feel better, you can try anything that you might. Twenty years of anger, and I'm about to set this monster loose. With bleeding lips and yellow eyes and bad intent I'm coming home to you. I've got a cleaver for a hand and my head's swelled up with hatred and with spite, and I'm coming for you now—you better lock your doors and cross yourself tonight.
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9. |
Bad Vibrations
04:26
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I held you under water and I washed your skin with fire while you used tourniquets of lace to choke the life out of the liars and I called you by your name and when you answered you were singing. Now I have crimson-baptized fingers, and my ears will not stop ringing. I sipped sweetness from your wounds and I started to unmake you. You grafted crystals into my nightmares, and I just used them to betray you. We heard evil space-age rock and roll from ancient limestone stereos. We watched the band deflate and blow away, but bad vibrations always will remain. When I laid you down so lovingly, with rings on every finger, you wept lightly and you crowned me the most vile of all the singers. You had princess-cut diamond corneas and poison poison in your system that I spoon-fed past your tongue of gold and used to make you kiss this world goodnight. I will follow all your traces, I will make your trek to Salem. I will lower you in a hidden grave and leave you there for Satan, because She has been so good to you despite her reputation. You said She would never do you harm or lie about salvation the way that I do. Oh, I would grow the roses, so I could cut them down. I'd fill my mouth with graveyard soil to show you what true love is all about, but dead flowers on the table, a sweat-stained collared shirt, shaking hands, and aching tongues could never raise a body from the earth.
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Gray Witch Rockford, Illinois
F. J. Downey is a songwriter from Rockford, Illinois. His band is called Gray Witch. Yes. No. Goodbye.
Gray Witch recommends:
Seek Good Advice
by Garrett Walters
autobiographical poetry from an amazing songwriter
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genre expansive sad-core
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“it feels like survival just isn’t enough, is it?” i love this whole album so much <3
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Crafting powerful songs about commitment and love, the Nashville singer-songwriter channels and subverts ’70s country and folk tropes.
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Sweet and honest bedroom pop made with the sparest of instrumentation and topped with poetically melancholy lyrics.
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