Distortion (live)

(Thank you, I'm gonna play new songs now.)

[Verse 1]

But I don't believe in ghosts or anything

I know that you are gone and that I'm carrying some version of you around

Some untrustworthy old description in my memories

And that must be your ghost taking form

Created every moment by me dreaming you so

And is it my job now to hold whatever's left of you for all time?

And to reenact you for our daughter's life?

[Verse 2]

I do remember

When I was a kid and realized that life ends and is just over

That a point comes where we no longer get to say or do anything

And then what? I guess just get forgotten

And I said to my mom that I hoped to do something important with my life

Not be famous, but just remembered a little more

To echo beyond my actual end

My mom laughed at this kid trying to wriggle his way out of mortality

Of the final inescapable feral scream

But I held that hope and grew up wondering what dying means

Unsatisfied, ambitious and squirming

[Verse 3]

The first dead body I ever saw in real life was my great-grandfather's

Embalmed in a casket in Everett in a room by the freeway

Where they talked me into reading a thing from the Bible

About walking through a valley in the shadow of death

But I didn't understand the words

I thought of actually walking through a valley and a shadow

With a backpack and a tent

But that dead body next to me spoke clear and metaphor-free

[Verse 4]

In December 2001

After having spent the summer and fall traveling mostly alone around

The United States, which was where I lived, which was spiraling into war and mania, little flags were everywhere

I was living on the periphery as a twenty-three-year-old

Wrapped up in doing what I wanted and it was music and painting on newsprint

And eating all the fruit from the tree like Tarzan or Walt Whitman, voracious, devouring life, singing my song

Sleeping in yards without asking permission

But that December I was shaken by a pregnancy scare

From someone that I'd been with for only one night

Many states away, who I hadn't planned to keep knowing

A young and embarrassing over-confident animal night

The terror of the idea of fatherhood at twenty-three destroyed my foundation

And left me freaked out and wandering around

Mourning the independence and solitude that defined me then

Though my life is a galaxy of subtleties

My complex intentions and aspirations do not matter at all

In the face of the crushing flow of actual time

I saw my ancestors as sad and misunderstood

In the same way that my descendants will squint back through a fog

Trying to see some polluted version of all I meant to be in life

Their recollections pruned by the accidents of time

What got thrown away and what gets talked about at night

But she had her period eventually and I went back to being twenty-three

[Verse 5]

Eleven years later I was traveling alone again

On an airplane from New Zealand to Perth, Western Australia

Very alone, super away from you and the home that we had made

I watched a movie on the plane about Jack Kerouac

A documentary going deeper than the usual congratulations

They interviewed his daughter, Jan Kerouac, and she tore through the history

She told about this deadbeat drinking, watching Three Stooges on TV

Not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child

Taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology

And when she spoke I heard your voice telling me about the adults who had

Abandoned you as a sweet kid and left you to grow precariously

And when she spoke I looked in her face and saw you looking back at me

On a tiny airplane seat screen at the bottom of the world

I saw a French-Canadian resemblance

And I heard suffering echoing

A lineage of bad parents and strong daughters withstanding

And she had black hair and freckles and pale skin just like you

And she told the hard truth and slayed the gods just like you

I saw the cracks in the façade of posterity

I missed you so I went home

[Verse 6]

The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève

When I watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house

And I looked around the room and asked “Are you here?”

And you weren't, and you are not here

I sing to you though

I keep you breathing through my lungs

In a constant uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out

Until I am dead too

And then eventually the people who remember me will also die

Containing what it was like to stand in the same air with me

And breathe and wonder why

[Outro]

And then distortion

And then the silence of space

The Night Palace

The ocean blurring

But in my tears right now

Light gleams