1. |
Interpreter
01:33
|
|
||
all
all strung
To the bears beneath me
and the buzzards on high,
burn my body. Monsters
stepping down from the moon,
where are your priests and valentines?
|
||||
2. |
Rise When U No
05:38
|
|
||
Track 02
Get a FREE DOWNLOAD of the Other Families album "Fyz1ks!1" at:
otherfamilies.bandcamp.com
facebook.com/otherfamilies
soundcloud.com/other-families
twitter.com/otherfamilies
When you know how we rose. When you know
how we rode. How we raise and how we fold.
When you know.
Has your castle of cards started tumbling?
Oh baby do you know about dating?
Oh honey do you know about chastity, destiny,
daring? When you know
you just remember,
we are wolves and this is wolf weather.
We are wolves and this is wolf weather.
Rise
when you know it was me,
sheriff where baby made a scene.
And there were always ways to find you,
you are my queen of spades.
In the morning milk and honey
and you’re sure you’re near the end.
Look over your carnage baby
if there’s sunlight in your head.
In a room with your two-timer
and she drags you by your feet
from under the bed where you been hiding
a thousand leagues beneath the sea.
At night in bed you’ll feel the sea again
if there’s moonlight in your head.
A sea, indeed, cause if baby wants to bleed
then we’re painting the town red.
But you know that through friends or through fire,
I will be taking your hand.
Hands strike high noon, your two timer
Draws from the moon. You reach for the sky,
and the star of the law loves the land, like a tar sand.
Take a walk on the Western side.
Don’t tell me to go.
Don’t, don’t, don’t you know?
I’ll lay you out on the West side.
Maybe you won’t. Bethlehem’s too big
for the both of us babe.
I’ve been going all night,
all star! And I’ve been going cookoo!
As a weathervane,
where the bird hangs,
it’s a sign to me
cash, oil,
potpourri—
Runaways, we are kings of Orient all!
What are we waiting for?
Nightfall!
In the morning back in Vegas
and you find you’re on the street,
swinging arms with a young lady,
sister to a slot machine.
In the land of milk and honey
you must find a gambling man.
Look over your carnage baby
when you’re hung up by your hands.
Go back
jack, do it again
Wheels turning round and
round you
go back, jack, do it again.
’cause your son is set.
Take a walk on the Western side,
the neon signs there will be quoting the bible
on fire on the air. I don’t know
if we’re guilty, the red’s changed hands so
many times, my black suits are all bloody. But
if it’s a baby, if it’s bare,
I will raise, bet
the farm for the manger,
take your father’s name.
And we’ll play house in Vegas,
a house of cards. Curled,
we’ll take our walks on the West side,
so remote from the Western world.
|
||||
3. |
Houston
04:52
|
|
||
Engage,
delay.
Distance molehills of mountains make,
blind as bridesmaids.
I stand a planet’s shadow.
Once I lifted my hand in a room
to block the light coming in from the window,
to look at the way it made you.
It goes with us when we go. Once
I lifted my hand in a room to
block the light coming in
from the window,
look at the way it made you.
All the furniture was pushed to the front of the room, like a photograph at a strange focus. This was the apartment just south of the launch-pad, where he could watch shuttles take off. A fly figure-skated it loops just above the surface of the white walls, and the slow light of evening
coloured the room with a kaleidoscopic brilliance, making strange shapes as it caught in the drapes doily design. A dog-lazy radio leisurely scanned. The ceiling fan turned slow circles, the clock ticked, a bulb buzzed, and the fly executed its figures, un-interpretable as crop circles or the similar shapes left on surfaces by coffee mugs.
Now at our last meal together,
saucers sing through our place.
You say if you go, don’t come back.
I’ll let you lick the plate.
You say if I leave go in full view,
with a tin can clenched in your hand.
But don’t you have your ways?
You will pay for your holidays.
This afternoon I woke in crested sweats,
and wanted to put a fishbowl on my head.
A rocket ship magnet pinned a note to the fridge,
the fridge an empty sabot shouldering the freezer’s shuttle,
an old grocery list, commitments are like
rocket ships, I think, then read the newer note,
“your mind is a place where everything swims,
and I hope you don’t forget that I’m leaving.”
All my days in the sun have come back singing.
Shadows eat the moon. Your urgency made numb.
I don’t know what item of frozen food I’ve forgotten,
but I wrote you a new note, in fire, on the front lawn.
Everything you said had such gravity,
as if it could hold, and hold fast,
like “opposites attract,” you attracted me,
but in square rooms our love grew oblong.
So I’ll wander wherever streetlights
make constellations, thinking of you,
for I am a lost astronaut,
and Houston, we have a problem.
My wall’s a blank sheet all day.
At night it goes black as a bomb.
The world turns on us always.
Which side are you on?
You’ll watch the rockets as they take off.
I’m strapped to an argument.
You count it down on a digital,
T minus 2, 1...
Only 24 but the lord’s got it out for me.
Paint spilled on the floor in my bachelor, I’ll still say it’s you.
It speckles the drop sheet, so
I clean it up, I spend my days doing nothing, watching TV.
You’ll always fulfill what you perform.
Pick up, pick the damn thing up, yes the phone.
Paint a Jupiter spot like Gorbachev’s
head. How could I refuse? I’ll tell you what. All
the ways that you loved me were all
the ways that you held me down.
Now I’ll paint holes in my house,
look down to the badminton courts.
The key: I put my arm round the back of your chair and you put your hand on my knee on the meat of my thigh I look forward to spring hearing the cordial moans of the un-satisfied.
|
||||
4. |
Single
03:05
|
|
||
like butterfly kisses being laid on the starch stricken faces of pillowcases by terrorists. In other words intentions were good but I think you should face up, face the music, no wind up toy won't turn to the knife in it's back and accuse it, turn and face her, itself fear, for if there is betrayal here I don't see it, just the equitable taking to task of two people searching for mirrors. Listen closely and you too could hear it, listen close enough, you never know what you could hear.
Well now you say you didn't mean what you were saying.
I hadn't thought you'd said much anything of note.
I'm neither your man, nor your mannequin.
It's a Freudian slip, right down your throat.
Young beautiful one what you wanted.
Sweet, pretty thing, smooth to the touch.
Smile, stay for a while, don't you want it?
Know there's a line but it won't mean much.
(Notice me, notice me:
a young pretty thing and so supple.)
Lips like lilacs,
you plucked the petals off of a
Lie! Don't even try.
Don't your morals tell you otherwise?
(How could it be, how could it be?
How can one make three into the couple?)
Mirror, mirror.
Can't reflect my innards.
If you could see my guts would I have thought
that they'd be bigger, bigger, bigger.
(And, for every night, I don't sing,
I sleep my solo: horoscopes, and
a hand in mine)
Hand in hand.
Oh! The circumstance!
Clean the dark right out of my mind.
We two are twins, we're Gemini,
which is to say we're twin infants.
(I know the feeling is more than fleeting,)
When they say you're underage, I say
you're underpriveleged.
(but I,)
So take me back to your
impoverished village,
(but I)
at the city limits I'll wait.
(but I)
can't. I can't.
Sometimes doing this means heading home an hour before the party ends. To get what you need and make an uncareful retreat, to have a turtlish love for your own personal cave deep. It means getting acquainted with your own apartment, and so, your own head. Yes, I know you know a few futons that would leap, as puma, into leopard print beds, inviting your hips to be organ-grinder to the accordion of their springs, but better to know your own music: whiskers rubbing out their rhythms on your chin, flies dropping with a plunk into the fluorescent light's casing, your unopened love notes a silent letter's stress-able rest. so your house is full of instruments. Yes, they pile up on the kitchen table with the government assistance cheques.
|
||||
5. |
Widower
04:18
|
|
||
Laid down so long. Lay down
on the floor, on the floor, on the floor, your
leprosy, where all your friends and all your faults
are all received. The muscles in my arms and legs are
growing long, but not as fast and not as strong as all the
hearts on cards pumped out for the people:
Valentine’s Day babe, disease receipt stapled
to the card, through the heart, my skin is
an able thing to stretch across the floor,
walk all over me
Katherine.
If not a transplant, you needed something new.
The doctors were patient, how patience could move in you,
and make your chest listen, this Valentine’s Day,
a card and corpse opened: you opened your shirt,
and lifted my heart away. You opened your shirt
and lifted my heart away.
We parted, me with a stitch in my wrist,
you with a gaping hole in your Hallmark,
so lifting the card to your lips, you say
“you opened your shirt and lifted my heart away,”
then added the heart to the punched card,
and had a widower deliver it to our street.
Your sympathies and doctor’s fees with it,
saying this is your disease receipt.
Say
you’re relieved to have it out in the open
your heart’s on your sleeve and what’s more,
in weight, you are a songbird but all they say
is take her to the floor with the other girls dancing
but I will stay, I will stay. I cannot break it off,
no I will not love you.
Another man mentioned was your breakout,
what you started to say when I started to shout
sour in your mouth babe,
sour my name.
Lovely and timid.
Oh babe, your heart’s about to break.
Praise him for healing
if your heart’s about to break.
Hands up for healing.
the rabbit and the snake.
Just stare into the ceiling.
Lay your hands across your face.
You and me,
we go at it until sweat
collects under your breasts “mad sex,”
“gotta have it.” I draw my hand
across your throat,
Son of Man, open the apple.
The maple has been irresponsible,
dropping its robins like sperm—
we bent over birds, their beating red breasts
in our woods as they were dying
as if their deliverers,
their wet nurses. I abandoned two
human infants on the place where a bird was
where you found them, and thought of you
as that first nurse— and so
you were a girl who nursed wolves.
I open my shirt,
so you may admire my moles,
lay your finger on my chest,
over the place where the heart is,
while I carve a heart in the bark of a sycamore
and your finger uncovers a porous,
ventricled, warm lump of ore the size of a fist while
a widower, senex iratus, stands
on your porch holding a valentine,
I throw my hair back at the hips and
suckle at the globe’s canopy, which
descends like a sheet where stars weight it.
So have I said it all or should I say again,
you were laid down so long,
now you’re married to an engine.
You are married to your chest’s new fruit,
you are married to an engine,
you are married to a man’s most absolute invention.
The false heart's in your body
the real one’s in your name:
you are married to an engine,
you will be widow to the same.
For even as your heart stopped honey,
and as you were revived again
I danced on the floor, thinking it your grave,
thinking I was a widower.
|
||||
6. |
|
|||
7. |
The Mare
04:30
|
|
||
No hangings here, so I thought if I build it could it hold for a year and a day?
Three-hundred-sixty-six lynchings in history will live on always.
If I plant the bones will the graveyard grow ivory teeth again?
Those tombstones, they may not talk that much, but they say their own names.
They rise to say
Rallies, round the gallows go, swing low.
Swing your partner. If she doesn’t know,
I know. You’ll be crying, I’ll be singing,
lets go to the rallies.
Things hanging:
the wind-chime’s in a tizzy. It rings.
Squid limb knots are knotting to a thing
I think is its heart, bird small and shallow.
The breathing in the
trees are also busy, flinging leaves
fall like flares, falling fires, fall trees.
Some fall leaves linger, blood tipped yellows,
I’m a sharper singer, cause
I cut my finger, Lizzie. It stings.
When they come they come sickle swinging so
swing. Swing your partner. He is hallowed.
Our names are on the gallows.
Smile, sidewinder.
The noose swings like a metronome:
cats playing with ribbons,
two shows for the children on
puppeteer’s row.
The noose swinging like a
metronome. Swing left, swing right,
with the wind at night. That’s the rhythm
of a dead man dancing his jig.
He put his best to rest in the ringing
of a taut rope. A dropped call
never said so much.
Swing left, swing right, that’s the rhythm.
1. ______________
2. ______________
3. ______________
4. ______________
On and on
and on and on: I carved my name
on the wooden wall, the signature
in your swansong.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
coming forth to carry me home.
I am playing hangman.
Can you guess the words?
Men are made of mistakes.
Bad medicine? Marble orchard? Dead man dancing?
He lost his footing for the last time.
I am playing hangman.
Can you guess the words?
Men are made of mistakes.
Ringing rope? Chariot? Or your manifesto?
He lost his footing for the last time.
I am playing hangman.
Can you guess the words?
Men are made of mistakes.
Shoulder forest? Harvest? Harvest? Hallowed
is the Lord. He lost footing for the last time.
Ropes, tremors, circle the wagon.
The devil’s in town.
|
||||
8. |
|
|||
Come down,
the underground’s saviour can’t sleep.
A day with no face a day with no face.
They said that you would have something for me.
You slay me you slay me.
Like a snake kissing a sprinkler,
a pair of scissors, spreading its legs.
We deal in desolation like real estate agents,
make homes in the hay. Hey. Hey.
Rolling our holes towards oceans, do you think we’ll rust? Damascus unmasks us.
This is the place you will
Rest until morning.
This is the bed you will
lie in.
When I was just a child
I saw a lion catch fire,
it was tranquilized. My
17th dream, and these seminal questions to solve,
why don’t you consult your magic eightball?
With the right music, you can make car washes Kubricks.
My lady married a hedgehog, and lay in his bed of nails.
What strange valleys we’re passing
on our way to the sun.
This is the bed you will lie in, lion.
I just want
to lie down
on your lawn
place my hand
on my tongue.
An angel considers its palm.
How do we live?
I just want
to fall back
into the pool,
its blue math,
a blue school.
Progress in project
How do we live
with this?
Come to.
Bloodhounds will pour out of alleys.
Scuba divers will excavate our sunken houses.
Come to.
They’re looking for you, in the valley.
Therapists spreading dead fish out on their couches.
So bring out the guns,
we are the ones,
We’re going on sa-fucking-fari.
Who has blood on their hands?
Yeah we are the ones,
so bring out the guns,
We’re gonna blow holes in the sun.
I’m in the kitchen, snapping spaghetti strands.
Lab Rat, I’d like for you to
have to
bank around it, like meeting a whale,
or waiting tables.
Meanwhile, sea trade
is improving celestial navigation.
Algebra and zero are imported,
with the rats in the grain.
Watching the planets, we realize
heliocentrism.
England becomes
a hub
for the trade of exotic animals:
parrots in the backs of pubs
like pool tables.
Meanwhile, Galileo’s working out
inertia, not purposed, but
moved by external force.
I look to kings, apartment
buildings, see orders of ascending
strength, endlessly increasing,
while you
move
the wheel turns taught you, elegant
as proof.
At home I flipped backwards, drew
rivers under lines of text,
irrigated letters.
When I called you “Solve,”
you came,
around the ledge,
your tail a curl closing
question marks. I came
across
a rodent in the gutter
(a little white number
knows its name).
|
||||
9. |
Hi Low
01:27
|
|
||
The girls are doing acid upstairs,
their long hair
in the fan.
Be there
if I can.
Hit me high low.
|
||||
10. |
Middleweight
05:39
|
|
||
Service.
Silence.
Scene:
Last night I woke and you were screaming like a bat.
The hallway empty but for four red doors, each an esophagus expanding,
the light under them playing silent monster movies on the floor in milky pools of black and white
relief. Something moving, something drew me down the narrows between two lamps’ sleeping
sentries past the closet where the umbrellas’ webbed skeletons lean like the shadows
we lack.
I opened the fridge, and out flew a thousand bats.
The furred fruit of their bodies samples of night’s black punctuation,
they left their screams ringing in light, their crumpled face flesh,
black glossy beads of the eyes set in their horror,
and everywhere wings.
They roost, heavy ones hanging like speed-bags with features, light ones like lost winter gloves,
their stalactites all grouped, blood bags black loot tuned to the mouse of my movement. My
mouth waters, late at night, it is drops clinging to the ridged roof of its
midnight snack.
You came for me. My prize,
fits me perfectly. Your size,
leave it in my middleweight.
Middleweight.
We drive, tonight I
feel afraid just to be alive.
Why would I eat your imitation,
ring round the middleweight.
The Middleweight.
Here’s a marked part:
there's a lot
ticked off
on your donor card.
So you bought her
salt water,
but could you bother
a blotter
for your daughters
to drop.
Walking in the dogs simmer, boil up.
They empty down hallways like echoes, as
in the kitchen I’m making you mud.
Moaning Pipes in the walls where moles may lay clogs
like cholesterol. Blind, they finger
futures in lint, history’s folds—
The way we live, knowing not newness nor prizing
the old, lay in our beds cold
as cutlery. Last night I did a bad thing.
Tie tree a willow all week, withering,
My rooms grow red with the morning—
that last night I ate a bad thing.
tonight TV movies take children,
chewing their lips, they thin out like bulimics,
a boarder, older we know this boredom as horror,
the strange crick in your neck, as if
always looking over your shoulder,
I jiggle the sand from a sock,
the dustpan leaves it a mountain range,
it is swept under a sea,
I beat that rug: in other words I love
the lamp, it is lovely.
In a directory
please find me
Under A, as in “a book,”
like all those
that I close, then walk away,
then fall sideways.
Hey.
How’d you get there.
I don’t know where (I am).
I’m lost.
Trees with lights in their lofts.
The freeway that foxed me.
When you want a bout, you find me,
Not hard to put a face to a hammer’s hen.
You can be my fortune cookie for a few teeth
that you can keep up in your mouth ‘til then.
All the hands that we lay through the round
I am sorry but proud, you will hunt me down.
The fist I kissed, the cross, the dogs barking,
So count me out, flat on the ground I hear them calling—
My lawyers add that
You’re wrong, Justice Hutchinson,
I’ll still say that I didn’t know what I was doing.
A splash of rifle, a psycho like Michael.
Approach the bench again.
It fits with a modern decay.
I bruised my brother’s brain,
Cain, the middleweights still waiting in the land of Nod,
he sleepwalks,
til they bang my head in.
…
I woke up and took the long walk to the bus stop,
pushed through the people gathered by the driver like a clot.
A man ate a jelly filled donut and it dropped
heavy blots on his breast pocket, false brooches.
I can’t shake it off, shake it out,
something nocturnal that won’t rest, behind the back wall,
smoking short cigarettes by the dog house.
Shuddering bus, square drop of blood, heading for
red mountain camps…
|
||||
11. |
Keeper
01:03
|
|
||
Obliterating angels
like explosions in snow.
Physics.
It was one of those could of's but didn'ts.
|
Other Families Toronto, Ontario
Experimental DIY arts collective.
We are self-made, self-produced and we've independently released everything we've put out.
Streaming and Download help
If you like Other Families, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp