A Clown and His Pipe - Hands Like Houses

There’s better ways for us to waste our days

Than returning stares that we borrowed for too long

For too long, swallowed up by an empty page

What starvation feeds you, devourer?

Of the words of a thousand authors and poets alike

Wells have emptied to wet your thirst

So I’ll shake down to the last, a drop of fluency

Just to carve ink into these precious words

To dedicate a thought in desperation

We could light a fire and forge a silver tongue

And drawn beneath our blunt remarks

Fashioned from all of our meaningless change

What would it take

To pry these ragged teeth, to tear these jaws apart?

What would it prove

To wrench them from my heels, to shed them from my heart?

Swallowing swords, sharpened by turning cheeks between blows

I feel this is better left a performers art

It’s a narrow throat that keeps a razor’s edge from the heart

I’d rather not speak in tongues, but I’ll make every breath

I’ll make every breath a piper, charming flames

Singing and dancing, oh, out from their smoldering bed

We could light a fire and forge a silver tongue

And drawn beneath our blunt remarks

Fashioned from all of our meaningless change

What would it take

To pry these ragged teeth, to tear these jaws apart?

What would it prove

To wrench them from my heels, to shed them from my heart?

(Swallow the pen, devour the sword)

Swallow the pen, now I devour the sword

Inhale the proverbs whole

Spinning on static, gouged before the peak

Oh, in this chaos of frequencies it’s so hard to speak

Now it’s so hard to speak

This noise is nameless, it’s stumbling like a beggar

Desperate for some kind of change

We could light a fire and forge a silver tongue

And drawn beneath our blunt remarks

Fashioned from all of our meaningless change

What would it take

To pry these ragged teeth, to tear these jaws apart?

What would it prove

To wrench them from my heels, to shed them from my heart?