Calculated Sacrifice

Fear is deep in the steel bones of the concrete
Penetrates the long streets
Everywhere I look are gulls, wheeling in the sky
But their bodies are rotting and they don’t fall when they die

I’ve seen it all in a flash
The tar-fired sins of the past
A shattered image sitting in the glass
And I’m trapped once the scaffolding drops
I’ll break once I hit the bottom if it’s real or not

Sad dreaming when I’m sick I laugh
Hard and sharp like a metal chassis ripped in half
Arm necrotizing still in its cast
The final fever burned through the fuel too fast

Pinned beneath the weight of tomorrow
But I was never placed only told to follow
So I was never real, just a moment of sorrow
So I was never here, just some time that was borrowed

It’s not a truth that I want to believe
But the doors that I was offered wouldn’t set me free
So until the hazy autumn fall of the last leaf
I will never sleep, never be at peace
I saw myself standing in the ocean as it boiled
Eyes dead and glassy staring out across the roil
He betrayed the dream to which I had remained loyal
I betrayed our dignity standing above the soil like

I’m the fury in a drum of black gold
The hunger in a crowd as the winter grows cold
The long forgotten prodigy hidden in the folds
Of everything I’ve hated in myself, maybe more

I don’t care what pride is at stake
A pair of pliers and a razor get a hold the blades
Nothing left to salvage, nothing left to save
Nothing else to sharpen if I want to stay the same

White plaster walls scanned again and again
Looks like I’ve gone to pieces I am proud and I’m vain
Bleeding my catharsis with an anger that I feign
Tendons wrecked in my arms, pills for the pain

The ships are all leaving the docks
It all felt so real but the water went and carried them off
Can you validate and nurse such a loss?
Or do you simply shed it with the slag and the dross?

Bloody victory or confidence or faith
Were not meant to compare against the sweetness of escape
So until my very essence finds another way to change
I will always slide, I will never break
I saw myself sleeping he was cold and far away
Pressed beneath the weight of my conclusions where he lay
He betrayed my body trying to hold up the weight
I betray myself with a promise I won’t say like

Jagged pieces there is nothing to collect
Blank glass shards nothing for you to reject
Broken and invincible, a method to perfect
I am nobody. I am nothing. I am worthy of respect

Molded by a pressure that could never take me down
Guided by an ending that I sought but never found
Manifesting all of it in rhythm and in sound
But you won’t find me here, you won’t see that I’m around

It was calculated sacrifice to keep myself intact
But I can’t love the emptiness or get a fire to catch
Everything I want to write I find by looking back
To when I’d play on my guitar until my fingertips would crack

Burning through myself until there’s nothing left to share
I’ve forgotten who I was maybe happy maybe scared
But I know that he was real because I wrote it down somewhere
Just a body and a thought and a paper and a chair