In Quantity
at the very bottom of everything
You drew yourself with a curve to your ribcage and it feels a lot like the dreams you haven't been having. The ones brought on by pink powders and blue drinks, the mixing purple that gets further and further... the dreams with a smile and blacked out eyeliner than wanders after your soul. After that spark in your eyes - the one that died down so long ago. It crackles like embers when there's a bottle down your throat, a blade to your veins, a finger down your throat. But. But there's isn't a curve to your ribcage and when you try to smile, on the floor, soaked in tears, it feels like the shifting of tectonic plates.
It's that 'you could write that' but you don't. You can't. It's wretched and sickening and every single word your teachers ever told you was wrong - the teacher that gave you a red A in ink that dripped, when you brushed it, in such a familiar way it's all you can do not to reach for the kitchen. The empty kitchen with it's empty fridge and its empty covers and the plates - the 2am plates with
I've been eating for you
scrawled in black pen, smudged red, glistening tears. You'd wear it, if you could. Tears. Flowing and beautiful and so enriched that you lick your lips, once, again, all dry skin and parched throat and tobacco. What a fashion statement. What a - well. You'd have to cry a lot, to cover your form, to hide your existence. More than your blue eyed brother and your blue skinned younger and more than your mother, the dead one, who never called. Not really. She was a funeral in black, in white, in the velvet red of a coffin she'd never have been able to afford. You sang your soul out for that coffin, and now you're corpse eyes that never got buried. Won't be put to rest, can't settle until there isn't a girl somewhere writing 'yellow bird' or a boy with a ratty guitar in second hand clothes staring lovingly from his attic window at the bombshell who never looks up from the ground.
You want your words to die before you, but there's a desperation to the tip of a bottle that just has your fingers itching for something less. Something painless. You think 'I'll be 55 and dead on the inside' and you won't make it, never make it. Just like they said. There's something, on the inside of a pale thigh, and it says 'maybe this time it's different', but you know the truth and it's like the burn in your eyes and the burn in your throat and the burn in your lungs when you forget to breathe, again. You're just some kid who got lost with a guitar and a notebook full of heart, borrowed love and fakes lives. You're a dead end alcoholic, anorexic - the kid in the corner ('who's he?') who couldn't force down a slice of toast but can't keep his mouth closed to sin.
It's school all over again but the spiky haired blondes with the smiles are business men with tight lips and those kids, glossy eyed and oh-so-unhappy, are dead and gone and you wish you could have gone with them. Wish you didn't have to not make it.
And when it comes down to it all, you'll never outlive Conor Oberst.
It's that 'you could write that' but you don't. You can't. It's wretched and sickening and every single word your teachers ever told you was wrong - the teacher that gave you a red A in ink that dripped, when you brushed it, in such a familiar way it's all you can do not to reach for the kitchen. The empty kitchen with it's empty fridge and its empty covers and the plates - the 2am plates with
I've been eating for you
scrawled in black pen, smudged red, glistening tears. You'd wear it, if you could. Tears. Flowing and beautiful and so enriched that you lick your lips, once, again, all dry skin and parched throat and tobacco. What a fashion statement. What a - well. You'd have to cry a lot, to cover your form, to hide your existence. More than your blue eyed brother and your blue skinned younger and more than your mother, the dead one, who never called. Not really. She was a funeral in black, in white, in the velvet red of a coffin she'd never have been able to afford. You sang your soul out for that coffin, and now you're corpse eyes that never got buried. Won't be put to rest, can't settle until there isn't a girl somewhere writing 'yellow bird' or a boy with a ratty guitar in second hand clothes staring lovingly from his attic window at the bombshell who never looks up from the ground.
You want your words to die before you, but there's a desperation to the tip of a bottle that just has your fingers itching for something less. Something painless. You think 'I'll be 55 and dead on the inside' and you won't make it, never make it. Just like they said. There's something, on the inside of a pale thigh, and it says 'maybe this time it's different', but you know the truth and it's like the burn in your eyes and the burn in your throat and the burn in your lungs when you forget to breathe, again. You're just some kid who got lost with a guitar and a notebook full of heart, borrowed love and fakes lives. You're a dead end alcoholic, anorexic - the kid in the corner ('who's he?') who couldn't force down a slice of toast but can't keep his mouth closed to sin.
It's school all over again but the spiky haired blondes with the smiles are business men with tight lips and those kids, glossy eyed and oh-so-unhappy, are dead and gone and you wish you could have gone with them. Wish you didn't have to not make it.
And when it comes down to it all, you'll never outlive Conor Oberst.