Seamstress for the Band

She came by for the kind of advice you disguise under the pretense of rum and beers. The Old friend, how’ve ya been? chorus hung in the air like an inadequate noise, an absurd aria that never quite captured that thing we most wanted to say. Hours passed and we gathered around our standby of old music, softly circling till the hymn we really wanted to sing began pumping out in rhythm from the patched hollows of our chests: did we make the right choice, choosing what we did? Then why this pale unhappiness, why are we still thrashing our bodies against the cliffs of someone else’s dream? Oh, my friend, I am still unfit to answer this. How do I tell her that it is only ourselves singing out there on the breakers? That the lullaby lures are only the sound of our own broken hearts, waiting for something that stopped listening a long time ago?

I crush lime into a thin glass neck and swallow its bitter ocean before trying to tell her about time, how it dulls certain aches and drowns others, how the longer it stretches the sticky bands of what could have been it loses the strength to snap back anymore, and how, strange as it seems, that is good. Good, and right. Time obeys the choices we make, if only you wait long enough. I wanted to tell her it stops hurting, and to be gentle, patient with her heart until the singing finally stops. My rum-drenched lips kept dancing around themselves, muffling the need to howl their own siren’s song loud enough for every set of ears to hear, all the while hoping and praying my friend’s eyes would stop lingering across the broken boat of my heart, lying, salty and hot, beneath my feet.

MP3: This Mortal Coil – Song To The Siren

get it here:


posted by rikki.
swim to me.