1. |
Holiday
02:56
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Stage Five, and you’re unwell, the fed and breathing lonely hell
That you now mistook for a daughter, marital bed witness to slaughter
Stranger things have happened
In the corners of your house
You were so different back then, automobiles and marching bands
Ford Falcon parked outside the station, eight months of folly and frustration
Stranger things have happened,
Stranger things have happened
You were 22 years old
You fell in love on holiday, the reverie and motorcade
Atlas came six weeks later, imagination transposed to labour
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2. |
Tiny Kingdoms
03:35
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Our secret state, our principality
A statute wrote, collaborated you and me
Crowns of chalk, and plaster castles stand
Milk and honey water, in the moats and in men
Stay quiet, they won’t hear us, we’re not going to bed just yet
Stay quiet, they won’t hear us, we’re not going to bed just yet
Fighting for scraps, of the skin on your cheeks
An easy war won without casualties
(You are more of a boy than I could be)
Stay quiet, they won’t hear us, we’re not going to bed just yet
Stay quiet, they won’t hear us, we’re not going to bed just yet
We’re not going to bed, or we’ll be trouble
We will
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3. |
Every Mirror
03:13
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Face down on my bed, lie down on my couch and hit my skull with a Dead Sea scroll
This land is mine, this room is mine, don’t come inside me, just yet
I’m gonna pull a white rabbit from your mouth for years
I’m gonna pull a white rabbit from your mouth for years
And I’m faithless at night sometimes, a winged horse, Pegasus
The first dress I ever bought, the first thought to salt my earth
And like Napoleon, he’ll only pillage my body, scar the continent of my wrists
In a room with nothing sharp, a Stanley knife across your heart
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4. |
Apple Milk Jones
02:40
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Held the brakes in my arms tight before the cameras
In the basement of the mosque they had discovered us
Foolish in our fifteen-year old ways, the fifty thousand old books said
We were something foreign
Mornings before school we’d sit around the TV screen
Bootlegged tapes and Spartan figures like men’s magazines
You were a red robin singing high up on your perch – but I was worse
Imran I goaded you into the fiery earth
Sunday school cartoons with Joseph as an antelope
Classes we would skip and in the rivers we’d elope
Swinging by the streams, how Merri creek still sings your name on every street
Of your town impossibly – in dreams he returns to me
Somewhere in the dark abyss of adulthood I scream
Calling out your name amongst the massed purgatory
But old Beelzebub isn’t so sweet to lovers forbidden to meet
Each other’s mouths on each other’s cheeks
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5. |
Atlas
02:56
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I woke up to blood and semen covering my thighs
Atlas was birthed from my body, what a surprise
I did not know that my fragile frame could carry a child
Let alone one with ambitions so high
Atlas just shrugged at his mother’s demise
Deeply spoilt, most ungrateful child
Plaid and knitted textures composed his skin
Designed to hold all this trouble in
Atlas, someday, you will grow larger than this house
The walls will all cave in, the plaster falls out
Electrical wire will seep into your body
And you’ll remember when you still lived inside me
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6. |
Red Ribbons
02:39
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7. |
Jason, Jesus Loves You
03:44
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You talked in strings and you crumbled your words
Far from composed, I suppose I’d infer
Barely my senior, Hydrangea in bloom
I watered the lawn, you came in my room
My parents went to Torquay for a day
Great Ocean Road and the arms of the bay
The sounds of the speakers were splitting my ears
But your voice’s cadence
I could hear it through the carnival
All of the colours in the night
Persephone to the underworld
Ali and the Book of the Dead
Alone in your house with your hand on my thigh
Anzac Day morning, brass figure arise
Concluding the hunt and the end of the day
Sodom and Gomorrah, on your lap I lay
We would make out behind the Dairy Bell
The storefront at night that led Beatrice to hell
I was mistaken and I was surprised
You left me cold by daylight
Spin me around like a Mamluk
Sad submerged memory arise
Trapped in the den of my lover
Trapped in the pit of your eyes
Now every day in cognition
In strange ideas you arise
Bell on the crack of the morning
My dandelion you will fly
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8. |
White
02:28
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How white his arms, how weak his knees, how strange the book predicted me
Like Heracles with steady feet, Agamemnon deep in foreign fields
My brothers’ car broke in the yard, the fire spread both near and far
I heard him cry from Galilee, he heard my song from Werribee
Al Taqwa secret summer camp, the skin was taut, tied were his hands
Oh, tell me where, you want to leave – and tell me where your body’s built
At Taqwa, secret summer camp, the skin was taught his tied hands
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9. |
Death of a Rich Girl
03:38
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Something’s wrong in this house, whatever struck you during labour
He grew up with a spine for spite, fifteen years later
I’m sorry I’m not sorry for any of this
You’ve been ill for quite a while now; you drove yourself to the doctors’
Talked to herself in her sleep, an absence of desire to dream
An absence of a body on my bed, emptiness when I lie beside your head
A living death, a fever dream, in dreams you return to me
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10. |
Sleeping In
04:01
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Our secret state, bound by ridiculous fate
Sobering adolescent mistakes I made at your mother’s
Your fragile frame, which my shaking hands can’t refrain
Oh god, for calamity’s sake, you were fifteen years younger
Stay, quiet, in the back of your bedroom,
I’ll carry your drip if you water the lawn
And I’ll tie all the wires and I’ll cut all the coils
Still you rest on this earth all the girt and the toil
So I walk in the back of your hospital bed
When the triage is empty and your sheets have been set
But you lay there unconscious, you lie unaware
When I felt half your arm only half of you was there
So I lie awake in the dark of my room
I imagine you there in your solitary tomb
Will you rise from the dead or will you break my heart
When I turn divine carpets, find nothing but marks
So I left you a note, a Pomegranate seed
To the world of the living from Persephone
I remember your house, I remember you there
Your lovely long locks then the lack of your hair
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