1. |
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My hands are bleeding again
I don’t know how it happened
Drifting gently into outer space
Watching them stain the sheets
My face is twitching again
Words won’t come out my mouth
It is shameful to be like this
Silent in your arms
And I am horrified to be alive
I am horrified to be
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2. |
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The person that tried to love you
Was doomed to grow in bodily lie
The way that I live is killing me
But why does it have to kill me quite so slowly?
I can’t wait
Told an ex I’m not a man anymore
They said “wait, what? I didn’t think you were one before”
“You are you, you are a goo and that’s all anyone can ask”
“We’re all just trying to figure this out in the last building burning”
But I don’t understand
Why I’m so ashamed of my body
No I don’t understand
Why I’m so deeply ashamed
I just want to know
What the hell my problem is
Vessels fold and I have received so much empathy
I hope that one day I will feel I have deserved
Shadows bloom and I have received so much empathy
I hope that one day I will feel I can return
I drift into shallow psychosis listening to the air conditioning unit
Taken by the soft hum of the fan as I sit waiting in the clinic
I look at the chair and try to discern patterns, try to ground myself
But I look too deep and fall straight through the floor
And you talk and all the while cosmic shrapnel comes out your mouth
And you talk and all the while I become dumb
And you talk and all the while cosmic shrapnel comes out your mouth
And you talk and all the while my brain goes numb
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3. |
Trespassers
07:12
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Nothing induces anxiety like focusing on the breath
The way it shortens and catches in the throat
The way it hides when seen
Finding the ways that bodies move so unnerving, so disgusting
So terrifying, total meatpunk forever
Hands beneath hot water, running until it scalds
Skin slowly picked at, so just the top layer comes off
Beer in open wounds, begrudgingly licked away
A pair of scissors hidden, scrawny shoulders covered
The most common grounding technique is to try to focus enough to find:
Five things you can see;
Four things you can hear;
Three things you can touch;
Two things you can smell;
And one thing you can taste
Imagine making it through all of that
Without being filled with dread at the way everything interconnects
So out of joint, so overwhelming and intensified
A trespass in a territory we have no way of navigating
A move out of a haze, a quiescent cloud
Falling off of the branch
And into the waiting and compliant brambles
There’s a hole in your leg, I taste the rain on my tongue
These days I keep saying let’s go to the beach
A dissolving cube, a devil in the kitchen
Put my headphones on and walk straight off the path
To a point just behind the treeline
Out of sight and hopefully out of mind
Where I can’t see or hear anything
Something like sensory deprivation
Deterritorial
Away from the rest of the world
I don’t think I want
I don’t want to have a body at all
When I think about you
I don’t feel much of anything
I remember your shoulder
Feeling so uncomfortable
The back of your neck
And your ribs through your side
Like the thing in my bathroom
Both real and not real
If I leave enough spaces
Leave enough holes in my head
They will be inked in
By confusion and otherwise
A stray cat’s corpse, the centre of a football pitch
Absent friends, moments changed and misremembered
Absent friends, moments changed
Moments changed and misremembered
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4. |
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I don’t know how to love this body
I don’t know how to love any body
The intersection of the two,
In the field near your parents’ house
Or the shrinking and cracking
Of my own in the grass alone
If I could change it
What would I want it to be?
A book, thumbed through but never read
The dregs of your morning coffee
A tree, swollen branches cut
If I fell through the world as I am
Or fell as the other option
Both would still be parallax
And in the angle where they meet
And all the empathy that spills out
There is no balance
No stillness
I don’t know how to love this body
In the hills a woman smiles at the landscape
A boy stares in his parents’ mirror
Neither of them exist
Except in the angle where they meet
And all the empathy that spills out
I don’t know how to love this body
Across the sound
And my shattered knee
Tooth on vibrating metal
With performative terror
A hand on pallid face
Sappho in the water
Smearing aloe vera on fractured palms
I have a hospital appointment tomorrow
Blooming beneath the flesh
Basking in the overwhelming everything
You are mapping some part of me
Or just mapping something for me
I wait on the shore:
The lighthouse, you are the pelican
Orchid blooms beneath the chest
Basking in the overwhelming everything
I was born a boy convinced they were special
Now I am something, content to be nothing
Just one of the weeds
And so happy with that
I don’t know why I’m still alive
But I’m glad I know you now
Maybe the universe decided I should stay
I guess it wanted us to be friends
In every hand something is lost
In every hand something remains
In every hand something is lost
I am scared, and I am ashamed
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5. |
The Tower
07:58
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You had a dream of a pond on fire
When you woke up you were sick in the sink
I am so lonely I could die
All my friends are so far away
Dealer won’t you please give me something
Flame crawl out of my window
Wax moon, you dissolve on me
Mistakes still stain my skin
I am so repulsed by
The thought that anyone could want me
Trapped in a tower that disgusts me
I look in the mirror and throw up in the sink
Cosmic body horror
Abstracting the self
Please don’t ever touch me
Please don’t do anything at all
A sinkhole, on the inside of your elbow
I disappear, briefly in your arms
Hidden driver, tape warps and melts
We both lie there, drunk in the sun
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6. |
To Love This Body
25:47
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