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lyrics

I spent a couple years in Hell. In the Seventh Ward, down by the City of Dis, you get the kind of clientele that finds a ship to board and checks into the brig. Me and the schismatics were swell, living it up like lords in our palatial digs. No lack of lots that fit me well, all jutting out like fjords right into the abyss down on the Rue 666.

I went to Europe for a year. I drank of what was near and, like a foreigner, pronounced the names with bated breath of various Vermeers and foreign words. Upon the battlements I crept, to peer into the face of North America. But every secret remained kept, there as in every place I’ve known a terrace of. If there were poems to be gleaned...yeah, well, you know me: I overslept. Somewhere, a string ensemble keened; yes, and I am told that Jesus wept.

I have been brushing up on my Proust, but there are no madeleines for you.

No little triggers on the shelf, or sitting on the plate to be bit into. When everything is just itself, there can be no escape, there is no interlude. And you are not a metaphor: you’re not the House of Lords, by giant consumed. And you are not a harpsichord covered in pitch and torched by kids in Waterloo. There is no easy way to know, just when I thought of you, if you were missing me. You’re not the reason for the snow, and being missed, it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s not by you that I was kissed when the rain came down and turn to mist, and I could feel it on my lips. I know it’s not by you that I was kissed.

Faukes’s likeness burned in effigy. Flocks of wights watched and churned on the heath. Now the winter has turned into spring. But Madeline, I haven’t learned anything.

Now I’ve been living for a spell in a rented room above the meat market. It wasn’t really a tough sell; I get up on the roof and watch the street darken. There are bodies everywhere, all getting bent like shadows up against the walls, and I can only sit and stare. I swear that there is something coming down the hall. There are bodies everywhere, but are they carrying anything at all? Or full of more than they can bear? They start to stagger, then they’re gonna crawl.

Seasons walked out the door without names. But now, suddenly, I’m not the same. I was touched by no reason or flame; but Madeline, suddenly I’m not the same.

credits

from Take Me to Your Leader If You Know What I Mean, released October 17, 2015

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Surprise Flapjacks Durham, North Carolina

Surprise Flapjacks makes music about communists, existential crises, zombies, and lovesickness (and, of course, zombie lovesickness). The Carrboro and Durham-based five-piece creates melodic, energetic pop awash in sugary hooks and group harmonies, shot through with nervous surrealism, and tempered with submerged melancholy. ... more

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