Andrew Bird

Bored holes through our tongues
So sing a song about it
Held our breath for too long
‘Til we're half sick about it
Tell us what we did wrong
And you can blame us for it
Turn a clamp on our thumbs
We'll sew a doll about it
And tell us all about it

How ‘bout some credit now
Where credit is due
For the damage that we've done?
Wrought upon ourselves and others
With a slow and vicious gun
And although pratfalls can be fun
Encores can be fatal
And then I hear you say

"Thank God it's fatal
Not shy
Not shy of fatal
Thank God."

Wait just a second now
It's not all that bad
Don't you count out the sun.
You're making mountains of handkerchiefs
Where the mascara always runs
So be careful when you're done
You're bound to get post-nasal
What, did I just hear you say?

"Thank God it's fatal."
We don't want to hear the sound of a door
And we don't want to read the signs that you bore
You know, the kind of sign you hang on the door
Saying, "we'll be back"- what a crack
Now don't you think we might have heard that before?

Bored holes through our tongues
So sing a song about it
Held our breath for too long
‘Til we're half sick about it
Tell us what we did wrong
And you can blame us for it
Turn a clamp on our thumbs
We'll sew a doll about it

Reuben, Reuben, I've been thinking
Said his wifey dear
Now that all is peaceful and calm
The boys will soon be back on the farm
Mister Reuben started winking and slowly rubbed his chin
He pulled his chair up close to mother
And he asked her with a grin

Chorus (sung twice after each verse):
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'
How ya gonna keep 'em away from Broadway
Jazzin around and paintin' the town
How ya gonna keep 'em away from harm, that's a mystery
They'll never want to see a rake or plow
And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'

Rueben, Rueben, you're mistaken
Said his wifey dear
Once a farmer, always a jay
And farmers always stick to the hay
Mother Reuben, I'm not fakin
Tho you may think it strange
But wine and women play the mischief
With a boy who's loose with change

Chorus (sung twice after each verse):
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'
How ya gonna keep 'em away from Broadway
Jazzin around and paintin' the town
How ya gonna keep 'em away from harm, that's a mystery
Imagine Reuben when he meets his Pa
He'll pinch his cheek and holler "OO-LA-LA!
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'?

Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms
Please do not treat me like a stranger.
Our Father would not like the way that you act
And you must realize the danger.

Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you
And one deserving of affection?
And is our purpose not the same on this earth,
To love and follow His direction?

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
Died and reborn
And then mysteriously saved,
Oh, sister...

Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door,
Don't turn away, you'll create sorrow.
Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow.

This isn't your song
This isn't your music
How can they be wrong
When by committee they choose it all?
They choose it all

Chin chin
Chin chin

You're gonna grow old
You're gonna grow cold
Bearing signs on the avenue
For your own personal Waterloo
You're bearing signs on the avenue
For your own personal Waterloo now

We'll fight we'll fight
We'll fight for your music halls
And dying cities

They'll fight they'll fight
They'll fight for your neural walls
And plasticities
And precious territory

This isn't our song
This isn't even a musical
I think life is too long
To be a whale in a cubicle
Nails under your cuticle

Chin chin

You're gonna grow old
You're gonna grow so cold
Before this song can deliver you
You're bearing signs on the avenue
You're bearing signs
For your own personal Waterloo now

We'll fight we'll fight
We'll fight for your music halls
And dying cities

They'll fight they'll fight
They'll fight for your neural walls
And plasticities
And precious territory



to mooonn6pence from papayeverte

You were right
There was never reason to worry
Money made your eyesight all blurry
Making lists of pacifists
Recalcitrant poses
Can't you see how dangerous
The one you chose is
Which brings us back to
Might makes right
So we learn from Wars of the Roses
Pain was only fear kneading your toeses

Making haste to spite your face to cut off your noses
Convince yourself and others that these
Fish smell like roses

Can't you see how dangerous
When you're too content to make a fuss
Can't you see how dangerous

Squint your eyes and see
Elephants, sycophants, elephants

Squint your ears and hear red-faced rants
Pleated pants
Sycophants
That's what you are

Can't you see how dangerous
When you're too content to make a fuss

This is a story, some kind of a story
this is a story about about a boy and girl,
a girl and a boy, a boy.

( ), only fighting.
that some boy in the dark while he held joan of arc
inverted crystal mountain kind of a story.

this is a story
man, about the serifs and ciphers that the scholars deciphered
translations of sanskrit
just as my handwritten story.
this is a story

where the singers begin to appear
in the spaces between all the dashes and braces
in the mothbitten story - of getting left behind.
this is a story

some kind of a story.

with the pages distressed sins you held to your chest,
they were mangled and dog eared, while the rest were just mangy and gory.

this is a story about the memory of water
translating the sound of the traffic.
remember the traffic?
it's making you carsick all along southfield freeway.

and translating mistakes and the trees and the stake
and the trees for the woods and the sound of the trash
for the sound of the blowing leaves along the southfield freeway.

my name is a blackbird, (breast is a) two tone.
feathers are warm in molasses,
twisting the words from the silence to gases.
now i don't have worry (of making it)
it's so unclear.

am i dead or am i dying
or am i simply tired of crying?

my name is a blackbird, (breast is a) two tone.
feathers are warm in molasses,
twisting the words from the silence to gases.
now i don't have worry (of making it)
it's so unclear.

am i dead or am i dying
or am i simply tired of crying?

my name is a blackbird.

I knew this one girl
Drowned in her own curls
Candy colored swirls
That never seemed to end

I could not comprehend
Half what she said to me
So casually
All our tender ears would bend

Tales of ritual self-torture
She's making you abort your
Most carefully laid plans
To make a final stand
The rest threw up their hands
Scoreless victory for serendipity

Tales of ritual sef-torture
She's making you abort your
Most carefully laid plans
TO make a final stand
The rest threw up their hands
In scoreless victory for serendipity

I dreamed you were a cosmonaut
of the space between our chairs
and I was a cartographer
of the tangles in your hair

I sighed a song that silence brings
it's the one that everybody knows
oh everybody knows
the song that silence sings
and this was how it goes

these looms that weave apocryphal
they're hanging from a strand
these dark and empty rooms were full
of incandescent hands

and awkward pause
a fatal flaw
time it's a crooked bow
oh time's a crooked bow

in time you need to learn to love
the ebb just like the flow

grab hold of your bootstraps
and pull like hell
‘till gravity feels sorry for you
and lets you go
as if you lack the proper chemicals to know
the way it felt the last time you let yourself
fall this low
time
oh time
it's a crooked bow
time's a crooked bow

fifty-five and three?eighths years later
at the bottom of this gigantic crater
and armchair calls to you
yeah this armchair calls to you
and it says that
some day
we'll get back at them all
with epoxy and a pair of pliers
as ancient sea slugs begin to crawl
through the ragweed and barbed wire
you didn't write you didn't call
it didn't cross your mind at all
and through the waves
the waves of a.m. squall
you couldn't feel a thing at all
you're fifty-five and three-eighths tall

time

when our mouths are filled with uninvited tongues of others
and the strays are pining for their unrequited mothers
milk that sours is promptly spat
light will fill our eyes like cats

and they shall enter from the back
with spears and scepters and squirming sacks
scribes and tangles between their ears
faceless scrumbled charcoal smears

through the coppice and the chaparral
the thickets thick with mold
the bracken and the brier
catchweed into the fold

when our mouths are filled with uninvited tongues of others
and the strays are pining for their unrequited mothers
milk that sours is promptly spat
the light will fill our eyes like cats
cataracts

When I was just a little boy
I threw away all of my action toys
While I became obsessed with operation

With hearts and minds and certain glands
You gotta learn to keep a steady hand
And thus began my morbid fascination

Tore the spines from out of all of these self-help books
Made myself a gun that not only shoots but looks
So real
It shoots through steel
With rays of dark matter

Do you wonder where the self resides
Is it in your head or between your sides
And who will be the one who will decide
Its true location
And does the thought of bile that's red and black
The thought of tongues that taste you back
Fill you with a naus-eous-eous sort of elation

A noose is loosed around our necks made of DNA
And every day it's growing tighter no matter what they do or say
And you can shoot right through it with rays of dark matter
Just before they kick out the ladder
With rays of dark matter
Like something catching fire

Do you wonder where the self resides
Is it in your head or between your sides
And who will be the one who will decide
Its true location

Dear Dirty, I'm a man strong and {n/a}
And I live in a cave, using my blood to draw,blood to draw
And I live in a cave, {n/a}
Something I come up to, something I come up to
Something I come up to, using my blood to draw
the blood to draw animal,like the bull
Dear Dirty,
Then I go to find more things,
Go for walks to find things I,
I can use to make the tools to kill
all these animals, or all these things
Dear Dirty

Turnstiles on mezzanine
Jet ways and Dramamine fiends
And x-ray machines
You were hurling through space
G-forces twisting your face
Breeding superstition
A fatal premonition
You know you got to envision
The fiery crash

Oh close your eyes and you wake up
Face stuck to a vinyl settee
Oh the line was starting to break up
Just as you were starting to say
Something apropos I don't know

Beige tiles and magazines
Lou Dobbs and the CNN team
On every monitor screen
You were caught in the crossfire
Where every human face
Has you reaching for your mace
So it's kind of an imposition
Fatal premonition

To save our lives you've got to envision
And to save all our lives you've got to envision
The fiery crash

It's just a formality
Why must I explain?
Just a nod to mortality
Before you get on a plane

Oh close your eyes and you wake up
Face stuck to a vinyl settee
Oh the line was starting to break up
What was that you were going to say?

Bored holes through our tongues
So sing a song about it
Held our breath for too long
‘Til we're half sick about it
Tell us what we did wrong
And you can blame us for it
Turn a clamp on our thumbs
We'll sew a doll about it
And tell us all about it

How ‘bout some credit now
Where credit is due
For the damage that we've done?
Wrought upon ourselves and others
With a slow and vicious gun
And although pratfalls can be fun
Encores can be fatal
And then I hear you say

"Thank God it's fatal
Not shy
Not shy of fatal
Thank God."

Wait just a second now
It's not all that bad
Don't you count out the sun.
You're making mountains of handkerchiefs
Where the mascara always runs
So be careful when you're done
You're bound to get post-nasal
What, did I just hear you say?

"Thank God it's fatal."
We don't want to hear the sound of a door
And we don't want to read the signs that you bore
You know, the kind of sign you hang on the door
Saying, "we'll be back"- what a crack
Now don't you think we might have heard that before?

Bored holes through our tongues
So sing a song about it
Held our breath for too long
‘Til we're half sick about it
Tell us what we did wrong
And you can blame us for it
Turn a clamp on our thumbs
We'll sew a doll about it

He's keeping busy
Yeah he's bleeding stones
With his machinations and his palindromes
It was anything but hear the voice
anything but hear the voice
It was anything but hear the voice
That says that we're all basically alone

Poor Professor Pynchon had only good intentions
When he put his Bunsen burners all away
And turning to a playground in a Petri dish
Where single cells would swing their fists
At anything that looks like easy prey
In this nature show that rages every day
It was then he heard his intuition say

We were all basically alone
And despite what all his studies had shown
That what's mistaken for closeness
Is just a case for mitosis
And why do some show no mercy
While others are painfully shy
Tell me doctor can you quantify
He just wants to know the reason, the reason why

Why do they congregate in groups of four
Scatter like a billion spores
And let the wind just carry them away?
How can kids be so mean?
Our famous doctor tried to glean
As he went home at the end of the day
In this nature show that rages every day
It was then he heard his intuition say

We were all basically alone
Despite what all his studies had shown
That what's mistaken for closeness
Is just a case of mitosis
Sure fatal doses of malcontent through osmosis
And why do some show no mercy
While others are painfully shy
Tell me doctor, can you quantify?
The reason why

to moonnn6pence from papayeverte



This isn't your song
This isn't your music
How can they be wrong
When by committee they choose it all?
They choose it all

Chin chin
Chin chin

You're gonna grow old
You're gonna grow cold
Bearing signs on the avenue
For your own personal Waterloo
You're bearing signs on the avenue
For your own personal Waterloo now

We'll fight we'll fight
We'll fight for your music halls
And dying cities

They'll fight they'll fight
They'll fight for your neural walls
And plasticities
And precious territory

This isn't our song
This isn't even a musical
I think life is too long
To be a whale in a cubicle
Nails under your cuticle

Chin chin

You're gonna grow old
You're gonna grow so cold
Before this song can deliver you
You're bearing signs on the avenue
You're bearing signs
For your own personal Waterloo now

We'll fight we'll fight
We'll fight for your music halls
And dying cities

They'll fight they'll fight
They'll fight for your neural walls
And plasticities
And precious territory

Five day forecast bring black tar rains and hellfire
while handpicked handler's kid gloves tear at the inseams
their Halliburton attache cases are useless
while scotch guard Macintoshes shall be carbonized
now they're offering views of exiting empires
such breathtaking views of Scythian empires

Scythian empires, horsemen of the Russian steppe
Scythian empires, archers of an afterthought
Routed by Sarmatians, thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire

Scythian empires, exiting empires
Scythian empires, exiting empires
Routed by Sarmatians, thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire
Kings of Macedonia, Scythian empire

some people wake up on Monday mornings
barring maelstroms and red flare warnings
with no explosions and no surprises
perform a series of exercises

hold your fire
take your place around an open fire

before your neurons declare a crisis
before your trace Serotonin rises
before you're reading your coffee grounds
and before a pundit can make a sound
and before you're reading your list of vices
perform the simplest exercises

so here at the end
the war is over
there's nothing left to defend
no cliffs of Dover
so let us put down our pens
and this concludes our test
our minds are scattered about
from hell to breakfast

hold your fire
take your place around an open fire
don't open fire

The finches and sparrows build nests in my chimney
With remains of the small flightless birds that you failed to protect
But the yolk isn't easy in fact it's a drag
As they're blowin' through cornfields and mountains of rags
All over the suburbs across the great lawns
And they're cropdusting gardens all over this town

But nobody cares when it gets in their hair
It gets in their lungs as it floats through the air
It gets in the food that they buy and prepare
But nobody cares when it gets in their hair

Across the great chasms and schisms
And the sudden aneurysms
Where the black ink will drip across the cuspis of your eyes
And your teeth, they're worth more than you can spare
Oh, don't tell me that it just isn't fair
Don't speak about the cycles of life
'Cause your thoughts are so soft I can cut 'em with a spork, or a bride's knife

And the wine made our mouths too loose
Such a reckless choice of words
When you told me that I'm too abstruse
I just thought it was a kind of bird
I swear, I just stood there
Not saying a word

I see a sea anemone
The enemy
See a sea anemone
And that'll be the end of me.

While the vicious fish was caught unawares in the tenderest of tendrils
Underneath her tender gills

I will become this animal
Perfectly adapted to the music halls
I will become this animal
Anomalous appendages
A non-animal

Hold on just a second
Don't tell me this one you know
I know this one I know this song
I know this one I love this song
Hold on just a second
Don't tell me this one you know
i know this one I know this song
I know this one I love this song
I know this one

Underneath the stalactites
The troglobites lost their sight
Uh oh

The seemingly innocuous plecostomus
though posthumus
They talk to us
They talk too much

See a sea anemone
The enemy
See a sea anemone
That'll be the end of me
Vicious fish was caught unawares
In the tend'rest tendrils
Underneath her tender gills and

I will become this animal
Perfectly adapted to a music hall
I will become this animal

Anomalous appendages
A non-animal

If you come to find me affable
And build a replica for me
Would the idea to you be laughable
Of a pale facsimile

So when you come to burn an effigy
It should keep the flies away
When you learn to burn this effigy
It should be
For the hours that slip away

It could be you, it could be me
Working the door, drinking for free
Carrying on with your conspiracies
Filling the room with a sense of unease
Fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone
Like the words of a man who's spent a little too much time alone
When one has spent too much time alone...

So if you come to burn my effigy
It should keep the flies away
When you learn to burn an effigy it should be
Of a man whose lost his way, slips away

Comes and goes
Like in fits and dizzy spells, like the weather
And it blows
Like it knows what's going wrong, like it's clever

Has a name but the name goes unspoken
Weather wanes were all twisted and broken
So soldier on, soldier on, soldier on, soldier on

Flailing to the whir of a snack machine
Muted screams of an old regime
And then, oh something gets in it
The nightshade gets in it

And we were all fast asleep, we were all so fast asleep
But you woke us, you woke us from the strangest dream
That an aubergine could ever know
Would ever know, would ever know

Lava flows over crooks and craggy cliffs to the ocean
And explodes in a steam heat fevered cyclical motion

Has a name but the name goes unspoken
It's in vain 'cause the language is broken
So cast your own, cast your own
Cast your own, cast your own

Soldier on, soldier on, soldier on, soldier on
Soldier on, soldier on, soldier on, soldier on
Soldier on, soldier on, soldier on, soldier on

Come what may
Lay your eggs where it's warm
We come here to swarm
Come by sea
Swarm like smoke in the dawn
We were the young
We were the swarm

Radiolarians
Midges and moths
Cut from a cloth
We were the young
We were the swarm

Flailing fetal fleas
Feeding from the arms of the master
Burrow into me
And this is sure to misspell disaster
Oh and the young in the larval stage
Orchestrating plays
In vestments of translucent alabaster

So they took me to the hospital
They put my body through a scan
What they saw there would impress them all
For inside me grows a man
Who speaks with perfect diction
As he orders my eviction
As he acts with more conviction
Than I

Oh, burrow into me
This is sure to misspell disaster
Oh, burrow into me
You're feeding from the arms of the master

We were the young
We were the swarm
We were the young
Radiolarians
(3x)

Come what may
Come what may
Come