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lyrics

I had a tense phone call
It was cold out, and I ran inside
the phone was thawing from the sweat beading on my palms
In the foyer, jostling knobs and pulling
In the staircase, lying down
I took off my coat, draped it on the rail
There was a pool my tongue was lapping
in the bottom of my mouth
during a tense phone call
I continued the call lying down on my staircase
red carpet with dirt independently crawling
the snow in my shoes was melting to accidentally clean
My socks were blue and black with dress shoe residue
Four small cylinders inside me were suddenly beside me
I looked down at my still-beating heart in my lap
and tried not to laugh into the receiver
Sometimes the walls are white,
sometimes they’re streaked black from rubs
but right then, the walls were all a tense phone call
I was restless from wrestling with space
into a comfortable position on my staircase
I couldn’t go inside for confidentiality
My coat begrudged, my snow shoes trudged
The wind was terse under and over my shoulders
and between my legs in assonant pace
Every “O” and “A” in the wind pounding out sound
interrupting the streamlined swell of it all
in the private Hell of my tense phone call
I felt one pedal digit fidget from under me
Left foot index toe twitching through a hole
I felt it actively in a calloused walk
From the 8th crack to the 2nd crack and back again
from the heels that I can’t feel to blackened ends
My socks depend on lighter steps
and I can’t manage to smile
in heavy stalks of ice that stayed and stalled
on the hair on my face in this tense phone call
I once cried in your lap
I was telling secrets to it and produced my own embalming fluid
Cropped past grimace in the stiff starch of his supposed ownership
projected onto your white pelvic wall
You brushed my hair with your hands
and separated dreaming tracks in its sand
I wouldn’t dream of ruining you
because you were all I knew
But you became tense lines later
on that day in the year of our cordial departure
the staircase are the bones in your ear
the wind wraps around a misunderstanding
I am an ape exercising restraint in fire
half-hearted in menopausal theater
There’s an attitude that’s being pressed into my socks
from my shoes bruised in blue-black permanence
There are faults of mine like cars stalled
and the movement shows no improvement in this tense phone call
There are poems I launch away
there are songs that lay naked in my arms
and there are people that learn to fly all by themselves
and then there’s you
and I don’t think I could ever feel comfortable with you again

credits

from Do Not Forsake Me: Selections From 2008​-​2013, released April 27, 2016
Previously unreleased
Recorded, mixed, mastered by Anthony Sanders

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Anthony Jay Sanders Chicago, Illinois

I sing for The Island of Misfit Toys, I sing for myself, and I definitely sing for you. This is a place to gradually release everything that isn't TIOMT.
For TIOMT music:
tiomt.bandcamp.com

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