Now Only

I remember looking around a hospital waiting room

Full of people all absorbed in their own personal catastrophes

All reading books like Being Mortal all with a look in their eyes

And I remember still feeling like no, no one can understand

No, my devastation is unique

But people get cancer and die

People get hit by trucks and die

People just living their lives get erased for no reason

With the rest of us watching from the side

And some people have to survive

And find a way to feel lucky to still be alive

To sleep through the night

I wrote down all the details of how my house fell apart

How the person I loved got killed by a bad disease

Out of nowhere, for no reason and me living in the blast zone

With our daughter and etcetera, I made these songs

And then the next thing I knew I was standing in the dirt

Under the desert sky at night outside Phoenix

At a music festival that had paid to fly me in to play these death songs

To a bunch of young people on drugs

Standing in the dust next to an idling bus

With Skrillex inside and the sound of subwoofers in the distance

I had stayed up till three talking to Weyes Blood and Father John Misty

About songwriting in the backstage bungalows

Eating fruit and jumping on the bed like lost children

Exploding across the Earth in a self indulgent, all consuming

Wreck of ideas that blot out the stars

To be still alive felt so absurd

People get cancer and die

People get hit by trucks and die

People just living their lives get erased for no reason

With the rest of us averting our eyes

When I was leaning on Skrillex's tour bus waiting for the hotel shuttle

In the middle of the night, I barely knew who I was

I looked up and saw Orion wielding a club and a shield

And there you were again, majestic

Dead wife

As my grief becomes calcified, frozen in stories

And in these songs I keep singing, numbing it down

The unsingable real memories of you and the feral eruptions of sobbing

These waves hit less frequently

They thin and then they are gone

You are gone and then your echo is gone

And then the crying is gone

And what is left of this merchandise

This is what my life feels like now

Like I got abruptly dropped off from the side of the road

In the middle of a long, horrible ride

In a hot van that was too full of confident, chattering dudes

And the sound of tires receding

Taking in the night air

I say

Now only