Keep the Faith
Frankenstein.
Say, the lights really are low enough to play.
Would you cast yourself so solitary?
You’re not the undecipherable Jekyll and Hyde that they think you are.
I’ve been here since the beginning, and to me, you’ve always been more like fucking Doctor Frankenstein, the man who tried to breathe life into death, to generate something beautiful in a room suffused with embalming fluid.
It’s the same old story.
The thing you create will always turn out to be a monster in the end.
The thing you create will always destroy you.
I am never going to be free from the image of your starving eyes, imprinted on my retinas like a hot chemical burn, the lingering electric scar that dances behind closed lids when someone stares at the sun for too long. From stage right, stage left, stage floor, I’ve been watching you ignite and smolder slowly for an eternity now, your polished edges beginning to curl until the rapacious flames consume every last eyelash, your ephemeral skeleton pirouetting frantically down to a tiny pile of jet-black ash.
You’re a train wreck, a plane crash, the five of us are fucking dying, and I want to turn my head away before the fuselage hits the macadam and bursts into peacock plumes of blue gasoline flame… But somehow still you’re beautiful, and just like the burning sphere of the sun that remains quivering for minutes on the inky, webbed insides of eyelids, I can’t avert my gaze.
Is that why you wear those dark glasses? Are you afraid of your own blazing reflection, burning brighter than fireworks, brighter than the edges of a solar eclipse, the white-hot arc of flaming magnesium, an atomic bomb spilling fire and spine-rending force?
Don’t be.
This is the mess you chose, when watching the Towers crash to the ground made your heart tear a bloody hole through the wall of your chest, and even though the world is still falling apart at the seams, even though there are sharks in the water and sinkholes on the beach and black ice on the roads and terrorists in Iraq; there are UV rays, acid rain and oil spills, mercury in the tuna, GSB and lead in kid’s toys and yesterday some fucker gave a three-year-old dope and filmed it for Youtube, you changed it all.
You didn’t fix anyone’s debt or anybody’s slit wrists, but you gave people something to hold on to and you kept trying, even when they started to lose faith.
Eyes shining bright under the lights that burn your pale skin like a dazzling cascade of napalm, sometimes seeing your smile – threads of pain climbing the cracks between your teeth – is like touching exposed bone.
It’s all so fucking painful, the waiting.
Waiting for the moment to come, when the razor talons will pierce your throat, when you’ll fall to your knees in front of all those gaping obsidian mouths in a finale that Jesus Christ could appreciate, splintered white bone poking through your jeans, the whole stage floor covered in buckets of Jolly-Rancher-red, millions of hyenas with teeth the size of piano keys tearing out a chunk of precious muscle and skin for themselves.
Please ignore the scene. Please ignore the buzzwords and the fakes and the body-doubles, all their brutal jackhammer politics. If their ravenous throats are devouring us, remember all the kids who would still recognize their hero, no matter how many times he slipped.
Just a bunch of struggling cells crawling over each other in a Petri dish; the experiment that hit pay dirt and spawned a motorized corpse with hands the size of toasters and thick skin painted jealousy-green.
Let’s reclaim the fucking monster.
Let’s make this taste like victory again.
Maybe we can tear off the flesh, squeeze until our fingertips pierce skin, sinew, muscle, and hit bone, and peel away the shit and the lies and the betrayal until we find something real, the unadulterated, plastic-white skeleton we started with all those years ago; the thigh-bone connected to the hip-bone, pure and bare and honest, a skull watching us with objective eyes and perpetually grinning—
We’ll strip it all down to the core and start again; we’ll watch the capillaries begin to form and see the blood pump through a still-unbroken red heart and we’ll know that we’re not dead.
We’re still alive.
We aren’t going away.
Keep the fucking faith.
Would you cast yourself so solitary?
You’re not the undecipherable Jekyll and Hyde that they think you are.
I’ve been here since the beginning, and to me, you’ve always been more like fucking Doctor Frankenstein, the man who tried to breathe life into death, to generate something beautiful in a room suffused with embalming fluid.
It’s the same old story.
The thing you create will always turn out to be a monster in the end.
The thing you create will always destroy you.
I am never going to be free from the image of your starving eyes, imprinted on my retinas like a hot chemical burn, the lingering electric scar that dances behind closed lids when someone stares at the sun for too long. From stage right, stage left, stage floor, I’ve been watching you ignite and smolder slowly for an eternity now, your polished edges beginning to curl until the rapacious flames consume every last eyelash, your ephemeral skeleton pirouetting frantically down to a tiny pile of jet-black ash.
You’re a train wreck, a plane crash, the five of us are fucking dying, and I want to turn my head away before the fuselage hits the macadam and bursts into peacock plumes of blue gasoline flame… But somehow still you’re beautiful, and just like the burning sphere of the sun that remains quivering for minutes on the inky, webbed insides of eyelids, I can’t avert my gaze.
Is that why you wear those dark glasses? Are you afraid of your own blazing reflection, burning brighter than fireworks, brighter than the edges of a solar eclipse, the white-hot arc of flaming magnesium, an atomic bomb spilling fire and spine-rending force?
Don’t be.
This is the mess you chose, when watching the Towers crash to the ground made your heart tear a bloody hole through the wall of your chest, and even though the world is still falling apart at the seams, even though there are sharks in the water and sinkholes on the beach and black ice on the roads and terrorists in Iraq; there are UV rays, acid rain and oil spills, mercury in the tuna, GSB and lead in kid’s toys and yesterday some fucker gave a three-year-old dope and filmed it for Youtube, you changed it all.
You didn’t fix anyone’s debt or anybody’s slit wrists, but you gave people something to hold on to and you kept trying, even when they started to lose faith.
Eyes shining bright under the lights that burn your pale skin like a dazzling cascade of napalm, sometimes seeing your smile – threads of pain climbing the cracks between your teeth – is like touching exposed bone.
It’s all so fucking painful, the waiting.
Waiting for the moment to come, when the razor talons will pierce your throat, when you’ll fall to your knees in front of all those gaping obsidian mouths in a finale that Jesus Christ could appreciate, splintered white bone poking through your jeans, the whole stage floor covered in buckets of Jolly-Rancher-red, millions of hyenas with teeth the size of piano keys tearing out a chunk of precious muscle and skin for themselves.
Please ignore the scene. Please ignore the buzzwords and the fakes and the body-doubles, all their brutal jackhammer politics. If their ravenous throats are devouring us, remember all the kids who would still recognize their hero, no matter how many times he slipped.
Just a bunch of struggling cells crawling over each other in a Petri dish; the experiment that hit pay dirt and spawned a motorized corpse with hands the size of toasters and thick skin painted jealousy-green.
Let’s reclaim the fucking monster.
Let’s make this taste like victory again.
Maybe we can tear off the flesh, squeeze until our fingertips pierce skin, sinew, muscle, and hit bone, and peel away the shit and the lies and the betrayal until we find something real, the unadulterated, plastic-white skeleton we started with all those years ago; the thigh-bone connected to the hip-bone, pure and bare and honest, a skull watching us with objective eyes and perpetually grinning—
We’ll strip it all down to the core and start again; we’ll watch the capillaries begin to form and see the blood pump through a still-unbroken red heart and we’ll know that we’re not dead.
We’re still alive.
We aren’t going away.
Keep the fucking faith.