an american prayer

Tell me what it felt like

Because none of us can remember

Tell me did we leave it at the bottom

Tell me did we suck out its last breath

To feed our own sickness, to keep it alive for the race we never win

Our lungs burning with the effort of outrunning mortality our lungs showing our hand

Brandish the cards we have nothing cough up the blood it is still there crimson red

With the rage we can’t get rid of, with the rage we try to outrun

Mortality’s keeper, mortality’s worst hand

Tell me was it always a shadow

Tell me was it always a threat

Look back

Did it look like this

Look back

Was there a madness so quiet

That ran rampant in all the classes that spared no one 

That fed off the perverse antidotes we thought up and shaped with trembling hands

Cut them open they have weapons, cut them open they took it all with the wind

Tell me what it felt like,

Tell me there was hope in desperation

Tell me there was a map etched in the ground

Tell me there was still a melody in the wind

That song that fell asleep with the alarm

That song sharp and clean that pricked tears that for once felt heavy enough to drop 

In the fields in Wyoming there are still silences that deafen like grenades

Rippling with the green and reminding you you have no right to claim here 

In the cemeteries back home, next to the highway

The people that warned us seep new secrets into the ground

That we drink up tasteless and toxic

The people let us take our poison like medicine

It is all they can do

Cut them open they had their lungs, cut them open they had our air

That we glimpsed in Wyoming and swore we gasped in Oregon

That we drank up then spit out shook our heads let them fall with the weight of the end

Tell me that we can start at the beginning

Tell me he’ll be there and he’ll look like he used to

Tell me was there beauty instead of blood

Dripping down from our lips, glistening in the eden 

Dripping down from the bathtub, echoing in the agony

Tell me did it feel like his hands in the morning

Tell me did it feel like those gasps of air in the dark

There is life that can be breathed back in the hollow

I know it I saw it down there at the bottom

And the tip of the iceberg is not white it is that

Hideous eggshell in the corner of his old apartment

That told me where we were when we lost the compass

Tell me was heaven so white

Tell me was heaven so cruel

Was there a spot for the worst of us

Was there a spot for the witnesses

Because dear god there is a murder

There is slow death everywhere

And nobody seems to care

Dear god there is a murder

There is a murder I swear