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Our Evil Inside Joke

by Nelsonvillains

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1.
The Cascade 05:30
All the women that I know put their faith in these signs and they tell me that I’d feel better if I believed in mine, but it won’t change when I wake up coughing and I drive to work; but it won’t change my jealousy about the words I cannot find. There was a subtle hope you shared with me when your lips were flaired, your shining teeth made pockets in my bad skin, oh I’m giving up, not coming back again and I’ll lose my mind One Day At A Time, and I’ll fall out of love with a knowing smile, and I’m waking up with a cigarette pressed between my dirty lips – and the sunlight blinding my weaknesses, I don’t put the fear in your head, I didn’t put that fear in your blood, didn’t put that fear in your blood. You congratulated me on my incidental job when I called you up – yeah you know how hard I worked for this one, now I just watch the cascade and I call you up to complain about my drugs and I talk like an asshole. I feel lonely and fucked up and full of myself, but I won’t watch my mouth. Cause when you share with me your bigger hopes, I won’t tell you still to just grow up because everything means more to me than this numbness that pervades my brain. And I lost my mind one day at a time with a play on words about the rehab kid, and I’ll fall out of love with a knowing smile and I’ll hit the walls in a sunset blind – Yeah, it’s twilight now and the drugs come out and they sink their liquor into my skin, I didn’t put that fear in your head, didn’t put that fear in your blood.
2.
In a train station kiosk on heroin dreams, I love the puncture like something I can’t recall clearly. In a big white building on the medical scene, slam the phone on the wall to my mother’s refrain: “I love you but you’re killing yourself this way, I love you but you’re killing yourself.” In the AA building working out the addicted maze, the haze that caught my guts in its reels, strung out my vocabulary. Writing poems, staying sober, not meaning anything – don’t tell me that the beauty’s in what I learned not to say. Oh, I love you, but you’re killing yourself this way.
3.
Play & Act 03:58
Hopefully, she says to me as I twist my legs with hers, and I don’t feel older now, but I act the part, assured that movements of gravity have given me good looks, and a talking tongue to lie with in the places that they hurt. I don’t plan on leaving town tonight, but I still feel the pull of the old sirens and the liquor, the hypnotized old bones. And my stinging wit compliments the way she avoids repose – if I make you a new body babe, there is nothing more that I can do, I am not a God in this room or a romantic across the hall – I sting my poems with obscenities and I memorize old songs. Of the movement of your body and your nervous energy, I want to write a sonnet, babe, but I only get glimpses of cigarette ash on the bedroom floor and scattered writings that mean so very much to you, you’ll always be secret. And when I am alone sometimes and I cannot sleep, I write you a poem and open my body, and pick out the important parts – they are all for you, you never make me tired, you are beautiful in this room where the light settles on dusty books and we read to eachother, and categorize the world: everything’s how I want it, but I still feel sad. My friends twist their batteries – we all play and act. We all play and act – we must so we won’t feel sad. We all play and act for eachother sometimes, but mostly for ourselves – we all read a line of biography, and I become the rehab kid, and I am never angry, I am only vehement that we all play play and act. We must so we won’t feel sad. We must so we won’t collapse.
4.
We’ve stacked up bottles of the president’s blood in this Beacon garage – it’s mixed into the walls and the dirt in the yard, and ghetto blasters in the gas station parking lot. At 12:55 my insomnia begins with eyes open, A.M. tongue wagging and… “we haven’t spoken in several months,” is how I’ll begin this letter I compose in my head next to humming metal at my incidental job where I live to forget every face I love, to roll their names on my detached tongue, dry with the morning, always jealous of polite bullshit in every limp-wristed hipster kid affect I salute and serve – every zealous boy with drugs in his blood, every savior girl who’s got a black heart. We’ve stacked up bottles of Coor’s and The Beast on this concrete, entrenched ourselves in something like love. Raised eyebrows and a loose-lipped mouth are all you’ve got to fight – fuck your parents, fuck your small town and your little life. Whisper up, Mary’s coming in a white veil with her glass of liquid – I’ve got pins on all my feelings and I’m throwing up through the shade of a window to daylight’s twisted smile. Open up! The lamp’s on but you don’t know what time it is. Open up all your feelings for Black Mary, open up her mouth so full of shit, and I am the last one alive in this mess, scraped my knee crossing a million, iron, tired train tracks with your dumb fucking number written all over my brain, I will say your name over and over again – with a bottle in my hand I hope no love’s lost babe. When I ask you to fuck, say get a train ticket – meet me in the morning and we’ll forget all of this: all the rivers and the countryside and the headlights at night, and the heroin dreams and those damp nights in the woods. I am done trying to talk.
5.
Getting wasted on the weekend as the winter descends is the right thing to do – yeah I will be okay if you will be okay. As the tire tracks and the accidents don’t bother us, we’ll find a stoplight that’s red, where you can rest your eyes and I can scream the winter sky a cold one, now I’m fucked up, I don’t have a wish or a tidy, naked statuette to sit on my heaving chest, put my brain right back to rest. Cause it’s early on your eyelids, and I’m distant, and you are still so new to me – but I think it’s something good, and I won’t pick you apart. I could make you love me, I could fill you up with all of my grief and my empty eyes – I could try to be a dog, I could tear your love apart. But there’s something in me, you’re all I need; but there’s something in you, you won’t find me. If it’s a picture, and I learn that it falls apart, well at least I tried to do something good – yeah I know that you’re good, and I really hope I’m good. But there’s something in me, you’re all I need; but there’s something in you, you won’t find me.
6.
Loving Gun 03:49
Getting this thing together with an old, tired brain, I found a pocket of consciousness before the last drink. And yesterday’s commute was fine, I will say on the phone, to my poor, small mother, and wake up again in a strange house where the neighbors never seem to sleep and I subsist off of coffee and the Marlboro man’s leash, and a calm, steady 30 picked up just yesterday, so the nicotine and alcohol can flush out my brain – and I’ll be waking up, thinking I feel fucking insane, I can’t reign in the far reaches of my mood-swinging brain. And Amtrack’s gun just went off when I was waiting for my train – I’d like to stand in the face of the lights and feel the vacuous wind as it sucks up my lungs in its minute detail with the bolts rattling the tracks man, if it should derail it would take the whole world with it, and it would be my loving gun, the one I pressed against my temple, composed of two straight white fingers. And the yard’s dry in the moonlight and the heater sings back to me as I try my time in the summer to make some important change – I promise to love you back and keep my evil brain in the place where it once was, on the white notebook’s page.
7.
Home 02:37
I am home, no one else is here – you are gone, left with your cigarettes and your crying fits. We broke up, broke our pretty trust and the bed is cold and smells like sweat. I am home, I am going to sleep. Is there a boy waking up in my chest? Is there a heart on my lips? I forgive you for getting drunk and getting sad on my time. I am home, I am going to sleep.
8.
In Minneapolis, in the rust-bucket Taurus, we scored heroin from the north of the city and chased it down with whiskey, watching Van-Zandt’s movies, we collected cigarettes in our jars of water, and somehow made it to work on time, running that mile down University with a stitch in my side. And we hung our Christmas lights just so over your Polaroids, making noise in the bedroom with no chance of finishing, and Jameson’s lips curled like the Wicked Witch and the sunset was bigger and the sky hung like heaven – and my father believed in God or the halfway house, and my mother believed in me and my lying mouth. And my mother believed in me so that I could carry her shoulders through the thick of our sickness with the throats in black water, the asphalt surrounding, we are all safe and sound, all safe and sound. And my lover moved in with her books and her rings which she took off at night when she lay down with me, but soon she couldn’t breathe and soon she couldn’t sleep, and soon she would not leave the ornamental sheets, and my father believed in God or the halfway house…
9.
The designs we reached by midafternoon that Sunday I skipped work and you ran away from home were huge and frightening, and I lay on the bed in white clothes, hands sweating, thinking “Oh my god, every day I get myself into trouble, someone is there to rescue me and pretend it’s all okay,” like a dry tongue on my skin, like the white windows eating the sun that flushes through my eyelids, and I’m coming back to consciousness from the million-tiled floor, where I first met you, my father, in the summer’s silent heat. And it all floated off down the river where we watched the mountain burn in March and my mother cry – right up the street, where the angles meet two red stopsigns and the swaying trees are the condos Don Lusk fought with bared teeth, and he died there just last week with a metallic click, and the lightning in the room where his daughter found him. “I always wanted a college girl," he’d confide to us in private about his daughter, "...and if she goes away, oh how happy I will be, I won’t need anything or anyone, just to see her grow up, not into dust or the drugs that haunt this town – I’ve been waiting for 30 years, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, or with the trains or the endlessness of days invariably passing, to know the loneliness, and how to feel insane when you step out onto your front porch into an unrecognizable street.”
10.
My God, my father, where do I begin? The newspaper’s full of blood and dirty needle tips, and I’m in love with my addiction even if I never was in love with you also, it’s all fine as the times pass. My God, my father, where do I begin? Is it Adam in Minneapolis, or the loverboy buses – is it the crashing on the Hudson, or the summers we left? Is it the telephone ringing echoes blacked out on a park bench? Is it the pills gone through the laundry or the quarry’s cancer drugs? Is it the sentences growing longer and more distant? Is it you, my father, who I’ve learned not to hate? Is it you, my little town, where I find myself awake oh so early in the morning with the ringing of the wind, the painted eyes of all the houses staring down on my back? You mythologized us, my brother, and you’ll pay for your principles, in every war chant, my god, we’re beginning.
11.
Occupant 05:29
In the house with crooked floorboards, on Main St., Nelsonville, I sweated into the carpet, hovered over my father and became violent. Now as I wake up every morning and try to control my breath next to hers, I sleepwalk Cleveland Avenue to work, and I smile at the women who walk back into me – I am trying to save face. From the shot in my lung and the poems you stole – they were all about you anyway, so just take ‘em to save face. In the house with crooked floorboards on Main Street, Nelsonville, we mixed our cool-aid with gin and met eachother trading punches – “This is nothing special,” I said. You laughed and we agreed, and we became inseparable friends but our intelligence got the best of us, yeah we tried to save face.

about

This was recorded between March and August 2011, in the basement of 231 Main, New Paltz, NY, and mixed & mastered to tape at 9 Innis Ave. in September.

It would have never happened without the support of all our friends, family, understanding housemates and mostly understanding landlord, so thank you so much everyone who helped make this possible.

credits

released October 6, 2011

Nelsonvillains are:

Alijah Molinari -- the drums
Cody Torlincasi -- the telecaster and the cheap yamaha keyboard, and the yells
Jake Harms -- the stratocaster and the voices
Jimmy Fraser -- the unbranded bass guitar
John Morisi -- trumpet on Track 1, 2 and 8 and the yells on Track 8

Produced by Cody Torlincasi & Jake Harms

All songs written by Jake Harms

All songs arranged by Nelsonvillains

Mixing, Mastering and additional tracking done by Chris Daly

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