The National reflect upon a seemingly dark world but then combat and overcome that hopelessness with powerful music. They’re like Joy Division with more intricacy, or The Smiths, but not as demeaningly sarcastic.
i need a bottle of wine to talk about trouble will find me.
Entwined spring, parallel
stress and tension,
medieval neighborhood,
cauldron of nuclear energy:
we were drinking gin &
tonics from the Earth’s jaw
when the news broke. Roses
are red, violets are blue denim;
cupcakes are poisons, love
is a dinosaur (extinct, et cetera)
spreading gossips of the future is an
old friend shouting “don’t
be scared.” Dear decadence,
dearer satellite map of New York,
dearest thrust-to-cannonball ratio
from which God puts cock to
a chasm: Contemporary, my fucker,
is the naive language
of structure; our fellowship
gets complex when
we rupture Hell in unsimple
shapes. Fourth of July,
fifth of August, sixth of astral
lighthouses surrounding
the blank spaces, seventh: one is
always coming upon some
American state whispering I am
some American state & I am
the lust to be within it
when the sun luminates. We dance
beneath the asterisks, douse our
toes in the ink. The odds that the
stars and the spheres
will write our sentence
remain at its nadir.
you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your…
