Now Only

I remember looking around a hospital waiting room Full of people all absorbed in their own personal catastrophes All reading books like "Being Mortal," all with a look in their eyes And I remember feeling like, "No, no one can understand," "No, my devastation is unique." But people get cancer and die People get hit by trucks and die People just living their lives Get erased for no reason with the rest of us watching from the side And some people have to survive And find a way to feel lucky to still be alive To sleep through the night I wrote down all the details of how my house fell apart How the person I loved got killed by a bad disease Out of nowhere for no reason and me living in the blast zone With our daughter and etcetera I made these songs And the next thing I knew I was standing in the dirt Under the desert sky at night outside Phoenix At a music festival that had paid to fly me in To play death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs Standing in the dust next to an idling bus With Skrillex inside and the sound of subwoofers in the distance I had stayed up til three talking to Weyes Blood and Father John Misty About songwriting in the backstage bungalows Eating fruit and jumping on the bed like lost children Exploding across the earth in a self-indulgent all-consuming Wreck of ideas that blot out the stars To be still alive felt so absurd People get cancer and die People get hit by trucks and die People just living their lives get erased for no reason With the rest of us averting our eyes When I was leaning on Skrillex's tour bus Waiting for the hotel shuttle in the middle of the night I barely knew who I was I looked up and saw Orion wielding a club and a shield And there you were again: Majestic dead wife As my grief becomes calcified, frozen in stories And in these songs I keep singing, numbing it down The unsingable real memories of you And the feral eruptions of sobbing These waves hit less frequently They thin and then they are gone You are gone and then your echo is gone And the crying is gone And what is left of this merchandise? This is what my life feels like now Like I got abruptly dropped off by the side of the road In the middle of a long horrible ride In a hot van that was too full of confident chattering dudes And the sound of tires receding Taking in the night air I say "Now only."