Evan Swenson - No title lyrics

after it was over, all we could do was marvel at the wounds we'd created, the thorns we'd torn from these forbidden piles of darkness and invited upon ourselves. we carried them like our fathers carried them, our fathers of blood and our fathers of spirit…we set out to create, to feel and to touch what it'd have been like to have been born someone else. the pain was enough to make us recoil–the pain was a design, etched like a tattoo over our ribs, beautiful and permanent and expansive… i set out to participate in the masterpiece of leaving. are these the right words, the right sounds, the right step? it's not even worth thinking about, because it's what there is. i'm falling back into the nights where everything started. nights that eclipsed the mornings that followed, nights that continued to shed their stars long after the sun had risen. shedding stars and receiving them. breaking them down into dust and absorbing them. somewhere in the sky there sat a throne and that throne was full of a body that i believed in. as this present is revealing, we decided, and we had to live. as this present is revealing, these pasts i'd thought were dead now stand in my memory as these panoramas and sequences of color, these memories of people and of places and of us– i don't complete. i abandon. and with every piece abandoned is another tear in my mind, and so here i am, sitting on what feels like the edge that constant, relentless pa**ing, giving everything i have to bring all these abandoned things back to some kind of completion. we were born under explosive circumstances, born by the fire that lit the tip that seared the flesh and lit the flame in my voice screaming “it feels like guitar solos thrashing across my skin” that has always felt like a prison–and i leaned into the alcohol and that leaned into the pain and it lit again on someone else's flame so as i jumped i opened my chest like christ and exhaled stars into the sky and i fell back onto the concrete, not expecting anyone to catch me. the sky was so deeply cut with black that every face was veiled with it. i walked with the crystals burning in me, my blood like fire, my speech like rapids of water. i walked angry, with heavy steps, and i walked to meet my ghost somewhere out in the dark when i had a minute alone. with the pain of recognition, it was like poison when we met hands, like the purity of his intention igniting against the convoluted dream i wear on my sleeve, his dream, and it was like he said: “what have you done to me?” and i told him, i told him everything. i told him things that he would find out in time. i wanted to protect him. the alcohol rolled off my tongue and the alcohol rolled off his tongue and it was like seeing my little brother, the little brother that i have in him, and he was hurting. i said: “i'm hurting, too. i wouldn't be back here if i wasn't. forgive what you will become, because it's not forever. it's only a flash, a blink. i will take us farther. those words you hold in your hand will rise, they will rise farther than than you dream, standing right here before me. please believe me.” he barely looked at me, but i found his eye. and in that moment two worlds pa**ed between us and the past we shared ignited and deepened the drunk, flooding me to a breaking point that started in my stomach and bled into my ribs and through my lungs and into my heart and flooded my face and i looked at him and he knew and i knew that it was him, it was my past and his present projected onto me to break me, and i broke. but i rose. with everyone else gone off and oblivious, i rose. there was no asking why. we shook hands again, and this time it didn't burn so badly. i could see our friends approaching him from behind, all coming out of that building he lives in and i know so well, and i knew it was time. and then there, as we stood still and alone together for one last minute, we heard a song off somewhere that we both knew the other knew, and i looked at him and said, “remember?” and with that he smiled, turned around, and faded out into that place where the only light is that light that he sees, that he has created, and never lets go of. it's impossible for me to believe that this kind of composure and closure exists–i know only pain and incompleteness. i just don't believe it right now. i don't know what to do with myself. i close my eyes and fall onto the bed, and let whatever world i just reopened swim above me, painful and potent and real. i left this after that. i fell back into the present, treaded for a bit, and drowned. i wish i could remember more. i'm still working with the fragments, opening my mind like i open books, just to take out a line and move on towards that something else that doesn't really exist. i'm suffering blows from every angle inside of me, hesitating to bring anything to completion because it would mean something that i did not and still do not understand but need more than anything–more than food, more than water. so i string these sentences together like beads on a necklace. if this is how i have to work then i will work like this. and as i do, as each line progresses and flows into the other, this self that i am struggling to break will succumb under the will of my conviction and my real face will emerge. all around me i have books, i have records and i have instruments and i have every word that i've put to paper up till this moment–consistent inconsistence and ruthless executions of emotions and experience dating back two, three years, sprawling in notebooks and in documents and scraps of paper and receipt, sticky notes, napkins. so i don't walk alone. we walk alone together. i walk in sync with all of my other selves and with their selves and if i had that letter which i wrote to her a year and a half ago i'd copy it out and i will, when the time is right i will. when i find my flow to this, find my purpose, i'll make this all fit. right now the only thing that matters to me is that i'm writing. everything else can wait. there's a pain in my chest, and i quit right here