Play For Today: Second Verse, Same As The First

23 January 2009 | 1:00 AM

Believe it or not, I actually have been keeping up my end of the ol’ creativity bargain the last few days. I’ve been coding like a banshee (come to think of it, do banshees code?) in an effort to bring a really awesome extant web application into the Facebook sandbox, but sadly because I’m doing that work under the auspices of a non-disclosure agreement with the folks behind the site, I can’t very well publish snippets of my code here for y’all to see. Take my word for it, though: it’s awesome.

Tonight I’m forcing myself to take a little bit of a break from programming so as to actually live up to the spirit (if not the letter) of my resolution. While I’ve got a couple of embryonic musical ideas, they’re not even well-formed enough yet for me to commit to audio yet, so I’ll have to do one or two of those this weekend. Instead, as a change of pace, here’s a lyric (or, at least, part of one), some loosely-connected scraps of sentences I’ve been clinging onto for a quite some time. Now before you read this, keep in mind that, after twenty-odd years of adoring The Cure, the lyrics I come up with tend to be incredibly overwrought and self-indulgent. Others – read, Robert Smith – pull this sort of introspection off very well. I, on the other hand, usually pummel it to death with my bare hands (or, in this case, my pen and journal). I wouldn’t exactly call it autobiographical in the conventional sense: the theme of this jumble is not focused upon any one incident from my past, or rather if it is it’s also at least tithing to several other periods of my life as well. Hence the (unintentional) disconnectedness of it all. My hope is by actually exposing these things to some air here on the inter-webs, I’ll be a little bit more likely to gain the perspective needed to polish up this turd or call it dead.

Sleep

Twenty-four hours ago
you didn’t know
and everything seemed so easy.
I’d made my bones about you
snatched every breath that they drew
and buried them deep
in the ground somewhere.

Now it’s all been said
we’ve raised the dead
and this thing is making me queasy.
Funny how such simple words can
throw the doors to hell wide open.
Bury me deep, please
in the ground somewhere.

I’ve been living hand-to-mouth
I’ve been staring at my feet
I’ve been hiding from myself
I’ve been lying through my teeth
I’ve been sitting on my hands
I’ve been trying not to breathe
I don’t want to go to bed
I just want to go to sleep

Now that I see it in print, I think I’m going to go ahead and preemptively call time of death at around 12:59a, CDT. I dropped “queasy”? Seriously??? Yeesh.

Posted by Andy in Play For Today