Pretty Girl

Happy Halloween!

RFHXOXO

Pretty girl
all alone
wants to know
where her daddy’s gone

Hey, pretty girl.

Midnight in the parking lots
it don’t take much to get me on my feet
I’m the age my father was
when he sank down into the streets

Hey, pretty girl.

Come closer
I’m an orphan too
I’m a man, doll
I’ll take care of you

Hey, pretty girl.

Two fingers–
the strap of her dress
she looks so brave
her daddy wouldn’t raise nothing less

Hey, pretty girl.

She pulled a knife from behind her back,
I said what are you gonna do with that?

Oh, pretty girl,
oh no no no.

William Thinks Too Much About His Ex and Creates a Temporal Paradox

Ever since I started this hullabaloo there’s been some debate about the worth of writing a song a week and putting out a rough sketch vs. taking longer to write songs but putting out polished products. It’s a pickle, yo. In the coming weeks I may work on old songs and post updates instead of posting new work. Or I may quit music and study law. JK, unlikely.

Friday!

RFHXOXO

Mad about how bright streetlights are
we get tangled taking off our shirts in my car
a pair of bells with nowhere else to make out
and nothing else to do, our steamy little stake-outs in Ladue

and in the dark, and in the cold
we got old, and it started to pour
we pressed against the soft upholstered doors

This was, now, six years ago
but it plays in my mind like a syndicated show

Draughted in red washed TV screens
struggling in the pockets of our skinny jeans
writing on receipts and finger counting
you see broken faucets, I see cheap and pretty little fountains

and in the bars, and in our beds
We get connected, burnt and disinfected,
Pills and pillows and piles of prospects, still

Turning stages and turning pages
and turning heads, I keep girls in cages, now
It’s just fucking, yall, come on, we’re just fucking around

Really, only six years ago?
Seems like more, how I’ve grown

It was, now, six years ago
but I’m still writing songs, so, yeah, you know….

Old Chunk of Coal

I’ve got a lot of pesky old ideas kicking around in my head, and with any luck I’ll actually get something done and it will show up here soon. Without any luck, I’ll still be living a pretty dope life.

Live it up!

RFHXOXO

Jed Laments Attaboy’s Condition

Have fun this weekend. Or, whatever.

RFHXOXO

I brought over a case of Corona
you were already totally stoned
burning incense in a jar of sand
and lighting candles like you want to atone
kneeling before the hearth in the dark

you call this home because your shit is here
you’re all alone but your neighbor’s hot
she’ll need sugar and come over here
you’ll say come in I’ll see what I’ve got

we never talk about your ex-girlfriend
you don’t even keep a photo of her
waiting on life to start again
it’s a forfeit to admit that you still totally love her
and you keep her torn up parts in your heart

and you call this home because your shit is here
you’re all alone, but your neighbor’s hot
she’ll need sugar and come over here
you’ll say come in I’ll see what I’ve got

Once you were our leading man
now you’re barely in the cast
She left you with bleeding hands
now you’re a symbol in paint and plaster
you might be pretty, but you’re still a disaster

I drink ten beers by myself
you fall asleep to The Next Generation
I watch and see how the future looks
I hate it here and I’m getting impatient
it’s never as good as the books or the hooks

and you call this home because your shit is here
you’re all alone, but your neighbor’s hot
she’ll need sugar and come over here
you’ll say come in I’ll see what I’ve got

Guts

Til next week!

RFHXOXO

I walked across the room real slow, I said
I thought you were pretty, so I thought you should know
that I thought you were pretty
so I walked over here real slow

I’ve been working up the guts
to beg you for the glory and if you tear my heart out
it’s gonna get gory
but at least I’ll have the story of how I worked up these guts

And some day I can tell our kids
your mother
completely ignored me
now get to bed, you’ve got school in the morning

Are you thinking about me? If so, what do you think?
I bet you dig kinks normal guys aren’t into.
Did you just wink or was that a regular blink?

Cause I could build you a house, I could build you a fortress
with servants quarters and stables for the horses
I’m not great at courtship but I’m OK at everything else

And someday I can tell our kids
your mother
used to be so gorgeous
now she’s just an ugly number in a long string of divorces

I like poems, I like them a lot, and I like the ones I write, but only for a minute. Every once in a while someone tells me they dig my poems and then I feel real cool and I write some more.

Anyway, new songs soon, and who knows maybe new poems. Oh, and a new haircut. But that’s a personal aside, not really any of your business.

Poems after the jump!

(I figured out how to do jumps and this is how I will post lyrics. I’m like a hacker!)

RFHXOXO

Bookshop on Santorini

I am in a nook with the short story collections,
facing a row of books,
but I’m looking through the space above the titles
past the new release table,
towards the front desk.

He came to this place to buy a book,
but Oh,
she’s English, too,
and now he has shifted his weight to one side,
a small and safe way of saying
I’m not ready to go yet.

He’s no longer dwelling on where his first love is now,
or recalling the girls dancing on the bar.

“Do you know the Greek word for change?”
she asks, handing him a few coins.
(Their hands touch for a moment
and I can feel his chest tighten.)
“You say ta resta mu.”
He repeats this,
I’m watching the first time
their mouths
have shared something.
“But that only means, you know,
money change.
Not like,
Obama change.”

He laughs, sincerely.
Now, I see him talking to their grandchildren
about the first time
he knew he would love her,
in a bookshop on beautiful Santorini,
He won’t remember me,
the open-hearted voyeur,
hiding behind the fiction,
trembling.

I think the whole place is trembling.
How excited these books are
to witness this meeting,
the beginning of a story
with no pages, no ending.

Behind me,
in the drama section,
they weep at the coming tragedy.
While across the room
the poetry books are singing,
drunk as all hell,
reminded of their importance.

And my own bitter jealousy
smothered
beneath childish excitement
that fairy tales might still exist,
that he might take her to dinner, tonight,
with the sounds of the ocean beneath the cliffs
begging them to fall in love,
jewelry stores screaming of somedays as they pass,
two strangers, two foreigners,
suddenly, entirely, forever
home.

On Normality

From my table at the café on Santorini,
I can see down the couple hundred feet to the sea,
across the blue water to the horizon.
There are white sailboats, white houses on the cliffs.
White clouds, blue sky.
There’s just enough of a breeze
to remind you it’s not a postcard,
and the waiters go about their business
just like the waiters
at that café back in Conway,
where the verandah overlooks a parking lot
and a gray world.
They don’t stop to gaze out at the horizon,
they don’t walk out of the kitchen and drop their trays,
overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.
The waiters on Santorini
don’t ever stop to admire the scenery,
the dishes in their hands cooling,
because they have seen it all before.

Sometimes
as you leaned in to kiss me,
there towards the end of things,
I waited as if for a passing train.
I let you press into me
let my memory take over and my mind wander
like I was on the interstate.
I moved your lips apart
and put them back the way I found them.
I watched you
feeling my boredom,
heating up as best you could,
taking what you could scrape away
from the hardened and cracking remains of us.

I walk to the edge of the cliff,
lay down and wrap my arms around the rocks
and whisper, pleading, crying,
begging Santorini to forgive
the waiters.

Company

“So what happens?” I ask Adam,
we sit, playing backgammon.
“Well, we go on. You keep living.
You meet people, they disappoint you.
Eventually you find someone who can
stand you for ten minutes
and you hold on to them
like the boney claws of death.”

Then, another night, he asks me,
“why the fuck does this keep happening?”
He’s grinning on the gallows
& I rub my neck.
“What the fuck.” I say.
“What the fuck.” he says.
“Let’s get shitty,” I offer.
Then it’s all whiskey & smoke
& suicide jokes.

“Life had become an endurance contest,
without prizes or plan.”
Berryman said that, the poor bastard,
his suicide jokes weren’t so funny, really,
he outdrank his drinking buddies
& died alone somewhere between
the bridge & the water.

We are the main characters of our favorite tv show.
It never stops airing & no one likes it but us.

Untitled (not on purpose, just forgot)

There’s a mirror behind the bar at Karen’s.
I sit on a stool, staring at myself,
pulling my ego up by the arms,
brushing all the dirt off.
I’m gonna give it another go.
Edward is in the corner, moaning soft and low.

I’d been sitting there,
smoking with Adam for an hour,
the place was almost empty.
We heard girls laughing from behind us
But when we turned to look
there was only the dark streets.
“There are girls out there somewhere,”
I said,
“but their lights are all turned off.”

After a while Karen goes to empty the ashtray
and Adam stops her, saying
Don’t, I want to be able to count
our….
He doesn’t finish the sentence.
There’s something tangible in that ashtray,
some commentary on youth,
and she throws it away, anyway.

Outside,
the girl I dug walks by with the guy she left me for,
a drunk foreigner criticizes America,
a cat gets hit by a car on a backstreet
and my big sister is crying—
she never gave up on her dreams,
it’s how we were raised.

There’re two new drinks in front of us.
They are new friends;
they won’t last long.
Three seats down an Irishman
pumps his fist; he’s won a free drink
in a game of Mexican dice.
Two seats down, an accountant from London
passes a credit card to Karen.
Next to me,
Adam reads poems
and we talk about good women
like kids talk about God
when they’re old enough to question.

I shouldn’t talk about graves, I’m too young.
I wonder, when I’m old,
if I’ll still be able to talk
about sitting in a bar with Adam
or about Edward’s dad,
showing him the road to his limitless future
and sending him onward
alone
with a box of bandages
and a white flag.

Past the Past

RFHxoxo

I have told myself at times,
shut those old birds out of your mind.
Leave them behind you, pack up and move further West.

Now I’ve reached the Pacific, and I don’t get lovesick,
dry desert lands and pretty lunatics.
What if I’ve rusted these padlocks and chains on my chest?

What if I can’t go back
to being tortured
in peach orchards
things that last past the past.

I came home for a wedding.
September rain storm’s a perfect setting.
Pulled in at midnight to the driveway of my folks’ place.

The backyard garden’s overrun
with zinnias, the new beds finally got done.
When I lived here, things used to grow at a steady pace.

My keys don’t work in the new
basement door
I don’t live here anymore
I knock twice, someone turns on a light.

What if I can’t go back
to being tortured
in peach orchards
things that last past the past.

I Have Friends

So this is a recording of me playing this song right after I wrote it, and now I’m putting it online as filler–dirty, dirty filler–until I can get home this weekend and record it proper. But the lyrics and the chords and everything are there. It would make a good B-side. Which, I guess, is true for all these recordings. One of these days I’ll stumble into an A-side. The guitar on this song is my nylon string acoustic-electric, plugged in, with some distortion, a la Sex Bob-omb from Scott Pilgrim, which is a movie now and you should see it.

Be good!

RFHXOXO

Get to Marina Del Rey with an hour to spare.
I hang out getting drunk all day by the ocean,
and I smell like salt and sun tan lotion,

and the beach fills up with pretty little pairs.
I’ve got lots of friends around, I swear.
Come around the corner and you’ll see them sittin there.

Little kids are playing with toy guns in the shallows
while some older kids talk about their feelings on their towels
and I’m looking at girls like some pervert owl

and someday I’m gonna belong somewhere.
I’ve got lots of friends around I swear.
Come around the corner and you’ll see them sittin there.

A lifeguard kicks up sand as he runs by like a gazelle.
Someone’s bloated body’s washed ashore with some kelp,
and the children are crying and screaming for help,

and I’ve got lots of friends around I swear.
It’s nice to see everybody scared.
All we have in common is this trauma that we’ve shared.

I tell this girl hey that was pretty messed up. She says totes.
I say I used to work in a morgue, and it was gross,
and I share a couple comforting anecdotes,

and the cops roll out their tape and people stare.
I’ve got lots of friends around I swear.
I’ve met this gorgeous girl in terrible repair.

She tells me her name’s Jess and she says Jess could use a beer.
We both complain about the pricey bars around here so
I offer her my flask, and she calls me her hero,

and she leans against me with her damp hair.
We go walk a while til we’re away from the commotion,
and she smells like salt and sun tan lotion.

Here instead is a long overdue recording of a song I wrote en route to Los Angeles last March that sort of sounds like a song about moving if you don’t listen to most of the lyrics.

Carried You Along

Happy Labor Day, whatever that means.

RFHXOXO

Sixty-five years ago
ash covered up the streets like snow
you dug your ditch as deep as you could
you took your shots and you took them good

and she strode straight down the highway
as the shells sang heavy songs
she took you by your collar
she carried you along.

First light tore into your eyes
they brought you out, they cut your ties
they kept their palms beneath your head
you didn’t understand a word they said

I’ll come to you at midnight
I’ll come to you at dawn
I’ll wrap your covers so tight
I’ll carry you along.

The wisdoms of living I could live without
I once had it all figured out
what happened to those things I had?
Who’s this stranger I need so bad?

It gets tough to remember
as the years keep piling on
the secrets I found in her
when she carried me along

The woods stretch out for miles and miles
leaves fall alone and they land in piles
the ground gets hard and soft again
its seeds grow tall, its hair grows thin

and if this is all fate
then I’m right where I belong
and if I’ve fallen from grace
then she’ll carry me along.

Agraphobia

This morning I thought of something super important to include in this post but I guess I forgot. Which is fine. I had a busy day, things get lost in the mix, no big deal. But you should know that if my day had gone a little differently you might have read something fascinating just now.

I put a little thing up there (^) that takes you to a list of all the songs I’ve put up here so far. It’s still not ideal, but it’s a little easier. Also, still working on posting lyrics. And by working I mean every few days I yell at Dan to make my blog better for me. I’ll figure it out. Or he’ll get tired of me yelling and do it for me.

It’s the last weekend before labor day weekend! Party!

RFHXOXO

I have some new pills to take
when I lose my breath and I start to shake
let’s go spend a weekend steaming up Big Bear Lake

I think I kinda love your friends
I love your job, I love your parents
The way you dance into your dresses and the way you taste
One of us is beautiful and one of us is sane
One of us is waiting to wake up tightly wrapped in chains

And in the still, still waters
I’ll watch my breath in the shallows
fear of death, fear is normal, love is hallowed.

I can always go back to Conway if things get worse
I wish God had given your body to a nicer person.

I don’t know how people feel
if there’s rationale to sex appeal
I don’t think you’d ever allow me to do something wrong
You take my breath away, there’s a lot of shaking going on

(refrain)