Interpret:

Hayley Williams

Album:

Ten Stories

Provisionally 'I' practically alive
Mistook signs for signified
And so since I’ve often tried
To run them off a cliff like Gadarene swine
and tied my thought-ropes in anchor bends
wondering whether we were someone better then,
or maybe just better able to pretend
(and what better means to our inevitable end!)


No, I don't know if I know
though some, with certainty insist
'no certainty exists'
well I'm certain enough of this:
in the past 14 years, there's only one girl I've kissed
In the blistering heat of the Asbury pier
we sat quiet as monks on the Ferris wheel
Until looking down at the waltzer
and out at the sea
I asked her, "did it ever have that recurring fantasy
where you push little kids
from the tops of the ride?"
she shook her head no
I said "oh, neither do I"
and with my grandmother's ring
I went down on one knee
and the subsequent catastrophe
has since haunted me
like a fiberglass ghost in the attic
my inconveniently selective memory
as provisionally 'You' mercifully withdrew
all the bearing points we thought we knew
Day's run, days set plot
our compass shot
we sailed waywardly on
singing out midnight archer songs
until well past dawn
it's still dark in the deck of our boat
haphazardly blown broken bows
our aimless arrow-words
don't mean a thing
so by now I think
it's pretty obvious that there's no God
and there's definitely a God!


I dreamt of the rocks at the Asbury dunes,
and that you jumped from the top
of the Log Flume,
and they gather like wolves
on the boardwalk below
and they're howling for answers
no wolf can know
I charged at the waves
With a glass in my hand
I was tossed like a ball
at the bottle stand
and I landed beside your
remains on the stones
where you cold fingers
wrapped around my ankle bone
while maybe ten feet away was a star
thousands of times the size of our sun
exploding like the tiny balloons
you'd throw darts at


I slept until our chest was full
of yarn we spun from Shetland wool
in socks from where the Dorset grows
sheared and scoured hours before
the rooster crows


the price of German silver fell
threw this disused thalers
down the superstition well