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Impulse Reality 062
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____ ____ ____
_I_R_ | || |\ \
M E | || |/____/ The Weakerthans Lyrics ("Fallow" CD)
P A | || |\ \ ir file number 062
U L |____||____| |____| released 10.22.00
L I | || |\| | appreciated by linear
S T |____||____| |____| we're just fucking with your mind.
E Y even_god_reads_it
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Somehow I got so bored today that I decided to copy the lyrics for
the Weakerthans' "Fallow" CD word for word. I don't know why I actually
started, let alone finished, but as long as I have them, why not release them
as an IR file?
I know this is a bit hypocritical, because I always think it is
really lame when zines release band lyrics as a textfile, but deal with it.
And I promise - this will be the one and only time IR tries to pass lyrics
off as a textfile. Hopefully.
-oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo-
"ILLUSTRATED BIBLE STROIES FOR CHILDREN"
Morning bright rise. Go over your lines. Iron your carefully crafted
desguise. We'd all like to sing. It's easy to sigh; to sprinkle a handful of
plausible lies. Our building will rise, poke out our own eyes. Publicly smile
and privately frown. A weeping reprise. Please hear my cries; I'd like to
pull just this one building down. So turn off the sky. Head in my hands.
Night keep me warm. White window-sill. Blinded by heart. Cut my hair short.
"Eyless in Gaza with the slaves at the mill."
"DIAGNOSIS"
I have a headache. I have a sore back. I have a letter I can't send. I have
desire, it falters and falls down, it calls you up drunk at three or four
a.m. to wonder when... wonderful. All the cheap tricks I tried too hard not
to pull. Pulled along or pulled apart. The diagnosis for a foreign frame of
heart. I have a story that I'd like to tell you, it's littered with settings
and second takes. I have a feeling that hums with the street lights and hides
under ice in always frozen lakes. My mistakes to make you cringe. Another
greeting like a broken creaky hinge to oil and push or pry apart. Found a
cure for being sure, and, as sure as anything, I'll smil for my reckoning.
"CONFESSIONS OF A FUTON-REVOLUTIONIST"
Held like water in your shaking hands are all the small defeats a day
demands. 10-6 or 9-5 trying, dying to survive. Never knowing what survival
means. Leave the apartment to buy alcohol. Hang our diplomas on the bathroom
wall. Pick at the plaster chipped away, survey some stunning tooth decay,
enlist the cat in the impending class-war. Let's lay our bad day down here,
dear. Let's make-believe we're strong, or hum some protest song. Like maybe
"We Shall Overcome Someday". Overcome the stupid things we say. Say I needed
more than this, say I needed one more kiss. We left that light on way to
long. Let's plant a bomb at City Hall. Let's kill a Member of the Legislative
Assembly, or talk the night away. You call in sick, I'll quit the word-games
that I play. I swear I way more than this half believe it when I say that
somewhere love and justice shine. Cynicism falls asleep. Tyranny talks to
itself. Sappy slogans all come true. We forget to feed our fear.
"NONE OF THE ABOVE"
All night restaraunt, Noth Kildonan. Luke warm coffee tastes like soap. I
trace your outline in spilled sugar, killing time and killing hope. This
brand new strip mall chews on farm land as we fish for someone to blame. But
we communicate in questions, and our answers sound the same. Under spettering
flourescents, after re-fills are re-filled. Negotiations at a stand-still,
spoon and and rolling saucer stilled. If you ask how I got so bitter, I'll
ask how you got so vain. And all our questions blur together. The answers
always sound the same. We can't look at one another. I'll say something
thoughtful soon, but I can't listen to the quiet so I'll hum this mindless
tune I stole from some dumb country-rock star. I don't even know his name.
It's lkike my stupid little questions: the answers always sound the same.
Tell why I have to miss you. Tell me why we sound so lame. Why we communicate
in questions and all our answers sound the same.
"LETTER OF RESIGNATION"
Takes a dried up ball-point, lemon juice and water, keeps a diary invisibly.
In the kitchen corner of a basement bachelor suite there's a certain search
for certainty, you know we'll never see her hands touch her childhood home in
photos that she took. It's one more ommision from a high school history book;
how whole lives get knifed and pushed aside. To whom it may concern... Take
a brokem bottle. Take a rafter beam. Take a needle and a tarnished spoon. Or
just words to kill off one more unheard statement of another dying afternoon.
She says she's leaving soon. So so long to ten hour shifts and faking
sypmathies. Farewell to piles of bills, unpaid utilities. All rolled up and
unfurled like flag. Wake up and pack your bag. To whom it may concern...
There's a bus that's leaving half an hour from now. It won't take her where
she really wants to go. So she sits there with her luggage at her side.
Leaving empty stations, leaving empty lives.
"LEASH"
Had one of those days when you want to try heroin, drunk driving, some form
of soft suicide. Sitting in silence and staring at ceilings or peeling the
paint off things to confide. Teach me to wiggle my ears like that, show me
the scar that you got when you fell of your bike. Ask me the questions you
never want asnwers to. We can re-write them however we like. Stop the
hardwood floor's lopsided grin. Leave the dirt and dead flowers in a brown
coffee tin. Let your hand melt the forst. Peer out under a sky that looks
just like a shirt I lost. Maybe someday the lies we've led will crawl under
our beds and sleep off the years.
"WELLINGTON'S WEDNESSDAYS"
(some internal dialoue) The night's a spill, a permamnent stain; the city
soaks in silence, salt and dirty snow. A blue glow from the TV again, the
curtains never open, faces never show. And every time a light is turned on
there's a light that's turned off somewhere. For every failing feeling that's
lost there's a perfect cost, there's a debt you can't share. And every night
they play the same song to the same offbeat believers. And everyone is
singing along wearing blueblack eyes, wearing dead men's neck-ties. Clocks
stopped at the corner of Albert St. will show your last bus left an hour ago,
so stumble down the stairs again, pretend you're not too proud to understand
and still know when your vouce cuts through the crowd that lonely people talk
to loud. Numbers on a washroom stall. There's always more than one last call
calling you.
"THE LAST LAST ONE"
You always stole all my last words. Here's no exception then, one more for me
to send. And nothing Happens in the end. I'm thiking of you less, more
concerned... and more is less, I guess it doesn't matter now. Maybe we'll
never go insane. You always we would. Sometimes I wish we could with you
lying in the rain and singing Boney M, cutting down all our old friends. I
talk to them again now. So here's the last one I have left. We fell in a
little deep, I watched you fall asleep. And nothing happens in the end, but
I remember when I could remember when. Seems like a long time ago.
"GREATEST HITS COLLECTION"
Knock so I'll know you're still there, half listening, interpreting the air.
Full of failing foreign tongue, my dialect of stammer come undone. I've got
these threads of you and I that I use to tie my doubts down, and from four
time-zones away, still yesterday, still talking to the past: from the front
seat of your car, gravel road and falling, falling hands and falling star.
Start the engine up. I'd like a new identity. A pseudonym. Some plastic
surgery. Or just a way to disappear. Someone to write me out of here. I hear
you hum an unfamiliar song. Thought maybe you would come along. Perhaps you'd
like to see some peice of this; my new philosophy is that a crappy tape deck
somewhere plays a greatest hits collection of strange and tender moments,
lost, stranded, and forgotten. I'll meet you there. (Something I forgot to
say: can't find a way to make this mark more clear. So crack your skull
before you weep, and I'll try to keep some part of me sincere.)
"SOUNDS FAMILIAR"
We emerged from youth all wide-eyed like the rest. Shedding skin faster than
skin can grow, and armed with hammers, feathers, blunt knives; words, to meet
and to define and to... but you must know the same games that we played in
the dirt, in dusty school-yards has founder a higher pitch and broader scale
than we feared possible, and someone must be picked last, and one must bruise
and one must fail. And that still twitching bird was so decieved by a window,
so we eulogized fondly, we dug deep and through its elegant plumage and
frantic black eyes in a hole, and then rushed out to kill something new, so
we could bury that too. The first chapters of life almost made us give up
altogether. Pushed towards tired forms of self-immolation that seemed so
original. I must, we must never stop watching the sky with our hands in our
pockets, stop peering in windows when we know doors are shut. Stop yelling
small stories and bad jokes and sorrows, and my voice will scratch to yell
many more, but before I spill the things I mean to hide away, or gouge my
with platitudes of sentiment, I'll drown the urge for permanence and
certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement.
"ANCHORLESS"
They called here to tell me that you're finally dying, through a veil of
childish cries. Southern Manitoba prarire's pulling at the pant-leg of your
bad disguise. So why were you so anchorless? Shoebox full of photos; found a
grainy mirror. Sunken cheeks and slender hands. Grocery lists and carbon-
copied letters offer silence for my small demands. Hey how'd you get so
anchorless? Got an armchair from your family home. Got your P.G. Wodehouse
novels and your telephone. Got your plates and stainless steel. Got that way
of never saying what you really feel; so anchorless. A boat abandoned in some
backyard. Anchorless in the small town that you lived and died in.
"FALLOW"
Wait until the day says it's closing, and public is put away. Write by the
light of a pay-phone your list of "I meant to say". Like "Winter comes too
soon", or "Radiators hum out of tune". Out under the Disaraeli, with rusty
train track ties, we'll carve new streets and sidewalks, a city for small
lives, and say that we'll stay for one more year. Wait near the end of
September. Wait for some stars to show. Try so hard not to remember what all
empty playgrounds know: that sympathy is cruel. Reluctant jester or simpering
fool. But six feet off the highway, our bare legs stung with wheat, we'll dig
a hole and bury all we could not defeat, and say that we'll stay for one more
year. Bend to tie a shoelace, or bend against your fear, and say that you'll
stay for one more year. With so much left to seek, the lease runs out next
week.
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Copyright (c) 2000 IMPULSE REALITY PRESS - http://phonelosers.net/ir
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