Mary was released on March 16, 2026 by Weather Worn Ltd. as a part of the album Twenty-Second AlbumP
BPM
Melodicness
How much the song possesses a clear and memorable tune that follows well-defined musical patterns. A song high in melodicness generally features clear and memorable instrumental or vocal lines.
Acousticness
A measure of how much a song relies on acoustic instruments (eg. piano, guitar, violin, drums, saxophone) instead of electronic or digitally synthesized
Valence
The musical positivity or emotional tone conveyed through the song's harmonic and rhythmic components. High valence corresponds to feelings of happiness, excitement, and euphoria while low valence is associated with sadness, anger, or melancholy.
Danceability
A combination of factors including tempo stability, rhythmic patterns, and beat emphasis to determine how suitable a song is for dancing. A "danceable" song may feature a consistent tempo, repetitive musical structure, and strong downbeats.
Energy
The perceived intensity of a track which may be influenced by tempo, dynamics, and musical compactness. A high energy song may have a driving rhythm and dense instrumentation while a low energy song can be musically sparse and feature slower tempos.
Lyrics
I was just a kid, my brain formed
Under the constant influence of opiates
Never allowing normal thoughts or emotions
About what it meant to be coming up as a student
A citizen, a part of family, friends
I was blocking my own identity by
Numbing any attempt to become something
A son, brother, athlete, there was no
Identity for which I was known and none
I owned for myself but junkie
Nobody knew who I was because I was nobody
I had no opinion, didn't care for myself or other people
Just where the next shot was coming from
That was all of life for me
So people didn't care at all when they could plainly see
There was nothing in me to care about.
I wound up getting kicked in the stomach
Broke a lower rib at the edge of a little trailer park
And it was late fall, but still warm
About 50 some degrees, but I couldn't move far
Nowhere to go.
Some kids found me and the mom came out
And saw the tracks and my ashen face
Took me back to the trailer put me on the couch
Painkillers and E&J crushed up codeine with
Tylenol but they had no works
I had to snort it but it still didn't fix the pain
It hurt worse than anything ever or since
Even all the operations
I used up all their liquor and dope
She scored some skag from a neighbor
But it didn't do anything at all
It was a long few weeks and
I couldn't get in the shower for a long time
Must have looked and smelled like death
Nobody spoke English except the mom
Lucy, she only spoke it a little to me every so often
But everybody spoke Spanish.
I took some Spain Spanish
Castilian in high school and
Mexican Spanish a little in college
But they all spoke too fast, and the
Tenses and genders never matched
I couldn't tell what they were talking about
Except for Lucy. No matter what she said
To me or other people, I knew excactly
What she was saying, it was like a feeling
Not knowing the words but the meaning
It was ESP, seriously, I knew what she meant
I knew the words without knowing the words
After the shakes and a couple days of sick
I got a steady supply coming from an
Old man up the street
Lucy always let me pay by leaving for the 10 minutes
Or so it took him and
I could think again a little, but
I still wasn't really a person
I didn't have a soul, or maybe it was just a
Blank soul, hadn't been written on yet
Hadn't been molded or identified
I was just an empty shell
Didn't know how to, and couldn't even act like a human
I never said thank you the right way
I didn't know how to sit in a room and not feel like
I was doing something wrong just by being there
I only wanted one thing, and the rest of life
Was a foreign language with
No subtitles, and now, like literally.
Lucy was the only one who could
Cross that gap to me. It wasn't because her
English was good - it wasn't
It was because she didn't talk like
She was trying to win, or prove, or accuse
She talked like she was trying to
Lifs something heavy without making it worse
Like she was carrying a bowl of water
And didn't want to spill it. Slow. Careful
But with strength behind it.
She'd come by and check on me
Like a nurse, like a mom
Like a saint trying to act like
Just a regular person
She would bring me crackers, soup, water
Those little boxed juices for the kids
Sometimes she'd touch my forehead
Like she was checking for fever
Sometimes after the kids were asleep
She'd wake me up with her hands
And she'd kiss me full, French kiss
Humid breathing right in my face
With these open eyes asking please, just a little
She needed a normal man, and hell
I'd try but couldn't keep it up
I knew I owed her and I wanted to give back
But there was no drive
That automatic fuck thing was just dead in me
I didn't know what to do to get her off anyhow
I had no experience with women yet
Sex wasn't a love thing, it was a how to get thing
I did the best I could
But after a few times she stopped trying
She understood I was still halfway feral
And I kept flinching guilty like
But she never looked at me like
I disgusted her, even though I must have
Specially in the beginning
I know I smelled like death
I wasn't showering. I wasn't brushing my teeth
Sweating poison
I was bleeding that slow weird invisible blood
Junkies bleed from places that don't make sense
Just hollowed out
A ghost with reluctanct pulse
But she didn't see the ghost
She thought there was a person trapped inside me
I knew it was just this thing I was, and I felt like
I was fooling her, but it kept me going
I watched her pray in that trailer more than
I ever saw anybody pray in my entire life
Not church prayer. Not look-at-me prayer
She prayed like having a
Real conversation with somebody
She had these beads, the catholic string of beads
Not the cheap plastic ones either
Some of them were heavy
Like round stones, worn smooth
She'd hold them like a tool she needed to survive
Like she didn't have it she'd drown
There was a Mary everywhere
Statues, pictures, candles
She had one statue
Mary in blue with gold trim, hands together
Eyes down, carrying the
Sadness of the whole world a
There was another one that was darker
Some kind of thing I didn't understand it
But it made me uneasy in the right way
Like somebody in that trailer was watching
But not in a "gotcha" way
More like a witness
Like if I died on that couch
Somebody would know it
And maybe it would matter
After a couple weeks
I started to open to see around
The kids were scared of me.
Not in the normal way kids are scared of strangers
Butma deeper way
It was my my skin
Wasn't anything I was doing or how I smelled
It was the skin, itself was the threat
I didn't understand that at first
I thought it was because I looked like a monster
Maybe some, That was only half of it
They weren't only scared of me
They were scared of what I might bring
I was extra white, the dope and no sun
They saw the white on me and feared
What I represent. What could follow me
To them it wasn't politics
It wasn't a debate. It wasn't "law enforcement." It
Was a ghost story that kills and disappears people
Some boogie man that comes in the
Night and deletes your whole life
Something your parents
Whisper about when they think you can't hear
Lucy didn't act like that though
Lucy acted like you could still do right even as a white
That's what made her different
She didn't reduce people down to categories
She didn't make everything into "her and them."
I was nothing and she fed me
Like some kind of goddamn bible verse
A fucking angel and
I didn't belong there
I didn't belong anywhere
Like a new take on no reason to be
When I started waking after a couple weeks
I asked her why she treated me good
She said I wouldn't understand because
I don't know God
She said if she didn't do right
It would be making God into looking like a joke
To her family
Now here's the part that's hard to explain
Unless you've lived in a place like that
Those trailers, six in a row,all one family
All connected by the people
It wasn't like separate households in the American way
It was like one long body with different organs
People moving between them
Doors opening, kids running, cousins
Uncles, grandparents
All folded together like survival itself
Was a group activity
And they didn't trust white people
They never had a reason to
They didn't hate
In a "history taught us this the hard way" kinda way
I was a white guy, junkie, bruised, sick, helpless
That alone should've gotten me
Thrown back out onto the road
But Lucy brought me in anyway
And because of that, when people
Outside the family came by
Workers, friends, somebody delivering something
Somebody stopping by to talk she'd make me disappear.
She'd tell me with her eyes before she even spoke
Hide
She'd gesture, point, whisper
Sometimes she'd put her finger to her
Lips like it was a game for the kids
Like she was teaching them "shhh we're being quiet," but
It wasn't a game. It was survival
She'd send me to that bedroom at either end
Or into the bathroom, or behind that half-wall area
Where you couldn't be seen from the door
And she'd do it with this calm energy
Like it was normal, like she'd done it a hundred times
Like she'd been hiding her family
From the world her whole life.
I was the one she had to hide
For me and for the family
And for the people visiting, too
Everything was threat, just everything
They owned those trailers but it didn't matter
That's what always killed me about it
It wasn't like they were homeless
They weren't vagabonds. They weren't criminals
They worked. They paid for things
They lived in America the same way my family did
But because they were them
The ground under them wasn't solid. It was conditional
Everything was conditional
The ones with papers would say they're illegals
They belong back to where they started
Well as I hear it they didn't belong back there
In the first place
Back there where they were born
It was just crime, and threat all the time
Back there, it wasn't enough to go around
So the strong took from the weak until the weak
Were going to die. We're talking
Farming out the men to steal and kill
Just for the basic needs of the family
Cause the Mean people
Owned everything back there, cause they stole it
Same with the women, with guns and dope
Or if they couldn't be mean then making
The innocent girls into slaves to
Whatever strongman wanted to do to them
These really, really precious women and girls
Just to get the basic needs back
There for the family
They had to sell their innocence and
Humaness to be murderers and slaves
So it was better to come here
Where there weren't people trying to make them kill
Or be a sex slave. They came here to the
States because there wasn't anyplace else safe
All the other poor countries around them
Were the same, and worse, because they weren't local
So here, it was worth the chance
And they worked, didn't work the system
They starved and worked for everything
And now, the power in charge needed
Somebody to blame for the unrest,
For the problems of an economy
These good people were an easy target
Just like where they came from
Somebody could come and erase them
I listened to the Spanish all day long
Fast Spanish, joking Spanish, angry Spanish,
Family Spanish. It moved like a river covering me
And letting me up for air, language and movement
I never caught all the words, but
I caught the temperature
I caught the meaning
You can tell a lot from sound
People think language is words
It's not. It's intention. It's mood
It's love or suspicion or anger
And the words are just the surface
Just hiding as the surface
And I noticed something else
Even when they didn't trust me, they didn't hate me
That's important
They treated me like a dangerous animal that
Lucy decided to care for
Like a dog with rabies that still deserves water
Like a wounded thing that would bite but still had a soul
They tolerated me because Lucy did
Lucy was the whole reason
She ran that place like quiet royalty
Not controlling. Not loud. Just the center
The moral center. The kids watched her eyes
The men listened to her tone
Everybody deferred to her without calling it that
If Lucy said yes, it was yes
Said no, it was no
If Lucy said "hide him," people acted like
Hiding me was as normal as turning off a light
And during those weeks
I slowly started to come back online as a person
It wasn't some happy miracle
But I began to see my own reflection again
I began to remember I existed outside of need.
And that made me more ashamed.
Because now I could see what she was doing.
She was risking everything for somebody
Who couldn't even promise
He wouldn't steal from her
Or unwittingly get them all taken by ice
She was doing it anyway
And what killed me, what still kills me now
Even thinking about it, is how bible she was about it
How Jesus she was. Not the surface stuff
But the real version. Like the real if it was real
The version that says you help the sick, the poor
The broke, money and soul, because
That's the purpose of it all
And if you don't help you're
Damned in this world and hell
She didn't talk it. She lived it
She'd do the cross on her chest
Before she left the trailer. She'd kiss the beads
She'd talk to Mary
She'd tell the kids "mira" and point at the statue like
Mary was family too
Yeah, she was crazy like that
And then sometimes she'd look
Over at me like she wondered if
I'd ever been knew a mama
Or had a girl to hold and put it into
A brother to fix stuff with, bust some heads
That's the one thing I remember the most
How she'd look over like she wondered
If I'd ever been a part of family
Ever had that kind of belonging love
But for me it was just powder, just light the brain
Get normal
It was only people for the fix, the fix wasn't people
The thing about terror is
It doesn't always show up with a gun to your head
Sometimes it shows up by
Training your nervous system to stay half-panicked forever
Like living under a ceiling that might collapse at any minute
Then it happened.
Not a rumor.
Not a scare.
Not a maybe.
It happened.
It was early morning. Dark
That deep cold-before-dawn dark
I remember because Lucy was already up
She was always up early. She was making coffee
The smell of coffee in a trailer like that
Is one of the saddest things
Because it smells like normal life trying too hard
Then the sounds started.
Engines
Not one
Multiple
Doors slamming
Men talking
Radios
A knock that wasn't a neighbor knock
A knock that said
You don't have the option to pretend you aren't home
And before the fear even fully formed in my head
Lucy looked at me
Her eyes changed. It wasn't panic, exactly
It was knowledge
Like she recognized the predator.
She pointed. Hide
I moved. I went to that end bedroom like
I'd done before. I got down low
I sat on the floor between the bed and wall like a rat
I could hear the kids starting to cry
Somebody whispering jumbles fast
Men's voices louder, closer. Hard English
Angry English. The kind of
English that isn't really language, it's an instrument
And then the door
Bam
Not opened
Slam Hit
Like they were testing it
And the whole trailer shook
With the sound of it coming in
I heard Lucy speak. Her broken English
I couldn't understand the words
Then but I understood the shape of them.
She was pleading but also trying to stand firm
Trying to protect. Trying to keep it calm
Then the yelling boots chaos gunshots
Not a movie amount
Real shots
Close
Inside that thin cheap trailer-wall world
It sounded like God crack the air open
Kids screaming that sounded
Really normal and peaceful for a second
Spanish everywhere loud and ringing
A man shouting in
English authority that makes you feel sick
Even if you haven't done nothing
I pressed my face against the carpet and
I swear to God I prayed but I didn't know how
I prayed a coward. a junkie
I prayed like "please don't let me be seen" because
I knew if I was seen the whole story changes
I knew if they found me there, they'd
Say "see? Criminals harboring criminals." They'd
Justify it
They'd salt the wound with logic
Then there was this horrible silence
The kind that happens after violence
And I heard one of the kids wailing the
Name "Mamá" over and over
And I heard a sound I will never forget
Rosary beads
They make a specific sound when they break
A soft snapping scatter sound. Like pebbles poured out
Then Lucy cried out
Not screaming
Not hysterical
Just one sound, like
Pain turned into a single syllable
And I knew
I knew they had her
And I knew it didn't matter that she had Mary
Statues didn't matter and candles and prayers
It didn't matter, none of it
She's going away
Eventually I risked looking out
a nightmare photograph
Flashlights. Vehicles. Men in gear.
People on the ground. Some still
Some moving. Blood making it normal
Four
Four didn't get back up
Not arrested. Put in jail
Not detained. deported
Dead
And Lucy the soup and prayer and mercy
Lucy was face down in the dirt a breath
Caught her and for a second her
Head fell my direction, and
The part that will break you
If you're the kind of person that can still break
She didn't look at me like she regretted it
She didn't look at me
Like "I shouldn't have saved you." It was
I'm sorry it's like this
It shouldn't be
Life is more than what you have
It was only about five seconds
And the light went out of her eyes for good
That Mary candle dark and smoking
Witness
Written by: Bryan Bridges
