How to Enjoy Being Dead, by Adam Crawford

How to Enjoy Being Dead

by Adam Crawford

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1.	Intro 00:10		buy track
2.	This Isn't My House 00:45	lyrics	buy track
I get out of a car. I hear it drive away. The past-midnight sky doesn't quite have a color. The faint-orange street-lamps disrupt the blue-blackness, making the whole night a pale wash of none of them. I crash inside and feel a couch. I hazily cognize that tomorrow, I'll be in trouble, but most of me is too comfy not to believe in my fellow man to do the math and just let me be.
3.	Wilderness Poem 00:43	lyrics	buy track
There are trees about and the sun doesn't touch them. The sun touches nothing; does not ruin with its heat or an excess of light. There is the brook. Small silver fish swim lazily. The ground is damp and flat and a rich black-brown. Moist grass shades the brook. Unseen birds make soft sounds. The peace is low and deep. If something walks these woods, it isn't me.
4.	[untitled] 00:50	lyrics	buy track
"It's like falling asleep in the ocean, this stuff," he says and takes another swig. "I can feel waves -- like, actual waves -- of tranquility rolling over me, rocking my brain with pleasant nudgings." "Yeah," the dream-man says, "it'll do that." "Why doesn't anybody have this shit in real life?" he asks. "Because this doesn't exist in real life," the dream-man replies. "It could though -- couldn't it?" he asks. "I mean, like, if I remember it later, I could actually make this real, right?" "Well," the dream-man slurs, "you can try."
5.	The Mind as a House 00:41	lyrics	buy track
The basement is flooding and I'm afraid the roof is going to blow off: so much crazy, flying shit out there and the storm keeps changing directions. I'm in a madhouse, pitifully staving off madness in a swirling, mad reality. The raging, space-consuming cyclone takes my roof. The bottomless sea swallows my basement. Where is anything in all this?
6.	Apology Poem 01:41	lyrics	buy track
I found myself on the receiving end of an apology today, which never happens. It's always the other way around: 𝘐 did something stupid; 𝘐 did something wrong; 𝘐'𝘮 sorry. Now here was somebody apologizing to me. I wasn't sure what to say. On the one hand, I could've just taken the apology, which is what people do with me only if I've fucked up with them a low number of times; and I that's supposed to be fair: 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬 𝘶𝘱 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬 𝘶𝘱 -- 𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺. On the other hand, receiving one now, I'm embittered by the whole concept, like someone who chased fame until it took everything out of them and, by the time they get it, they're just resentful of it; I could've slammed their apology to the ground as an effigy of all apologies: fuck that. Don't apologize to me. Don't ask me to make you my dog, begging for some bone of forgiveness. We are all fuck-ups to some degree. I don't know how so many people avoid being the guy that always fucks up, but I know this much: it's a ruse that they're not that guy. The Fuck-Up is you too, pal. When they apologized to me, what I said was, "I'm a better friend than you."
7.	That Punch in the Face You Owe Me 00:47	lyrics	buy track
I was gonna get it and you were gonna give it to me and it would've surely started me on my long quest for vengeance against the world and against life. I would've drawn a samurai's blade and bought a big-ass motorcycle and talked like I was in Tarantino-Land; but someone came and broke us up and pulled me away from you and I was robbed of that whole future. You're probably off now living just like that. I'd ask you to come by and have at me, but it'd be too late to do me any good now.
8.	Strange Noises 01:22	lyrics	buy track
Something is heard. Someone is awake: it's me. In the two seconds before personality returns to the brain upon waking, lightning bolts of cold shoot up from the floor into my bare feet. I hate the hard-wood floor. I miss the carpeting -- the dog-pissy, discolored, faintly-damp carpeting that didn't murder the nerve-endings in my feet. We had to remove it. I cross the floor to the door. Outside, the sound is billowing from three streets over. It's equally mammalian and inorganic. There's lights too and I can't tell if it's just streetlights or the lights of far-off buildings or a house-party at this hour. I'm in my undies and sockies and it's fuck-o'-clock at night and I really should go back to bed, but I'm pretty sure it's aliens because I don't know what the fuck those sounds were. I'm just standing on my lawn in the dark, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. Show yourselves. I dare you.
9.	Poem About The Man 01:50	lyrics	buy track
On a bad T.V. show, I watched two FBI agents driving the speed-limit down the highway in black sunglasses, headbobbing in the car to a band I like. It wasn't an ironic scene. These were the good guys. This was supposed to be a badass moment. Seriously? . . . I don't care if it's a show. These people are not good guys. They are not friends of the people. They are above the people. They are the Man and the Man keeps everyone down. They are your overlords. They make way more money than you and they get to invade your privacy and they can take your whole life away from you, should they feel so inclined. It's unethical to paint an FBI agent as a good person who genuinely tries to do the right thing. I'm sure good FBI agents exist, but it's simply contrary-to-history -- not to mention, insulting -- for T.V. writers on a show that reaches thousands or millions of stupid moms, stupid dads and impressionable kids to produce such a false, sanitized fantasy of an upstanding and moral bureau every single week, like it's not hurting America. It is. Stop it: the Man is not allowed to rock out. Rockin' out is for human beings who stand against the Man. The Man must listen to something else -- country-pop maybe.
10.	Awake Past the Witching Hour 00:56	lyrics	buy track
The room is cold. The bed is warm with body heat. The blanket is thick and prickly. My bladder is full. My stomach is only half empty. My eyes don't stay closed. I'm not normally up this late. I drift with the current of the hour. My left thumb has muscle-spasms. My forehead feels heavy. The pillow muffs my ears. A leg itches. The future is a damming boulder to the flow of the river of time. It should be the sea, but instead, it's a boulder. I am not properly broken up. I am awake when I shouldn't be. I don't have an answer for this. I didn't think I would.
11.	The Farm Cat 02:14	lyrics	buy track
The farm cat wags its tail for months, awaiting a pat from the farmer. It gets one: the farmer scratches its head and under its dirty chin and rubs his knuckles between the ears. The farmer leaves in the truck and is gone for two weeks. The farm cat stalks the acres and the mole-hills within, turning up field mice and gophers. The farm cat survives, but more than food, desires the farmer. The farmer comes back and the farm cat springs to greet him. The farmer notices the farm cat. Possibly, next time, the farmer will put both his hands on the farm cat, like when the farm cat was small and lived in the farm house. The farm cat goes about being a farm cat and the farmer tends to larger things and months pass without eye-contact, searched for nor happened upon. In the autumn, the farm cat limps to the house with a fucked-up leg. It calls for the farmer. The farmer does not come. It sleeps by the door for three days. One morning, the farmhouse dogs break loose from the backdoor and chase the farm cat into a tree. They bark at it and it does not come down. The sun sets, then rises again and the dogs beneath the tree have gone. The farm cat climbs down and walks away from the farmhouse, into the wild acres of land beyond. It crosses through a hole in the fence-wire and keeps going until it comes across new fields with new mice and gophers. The farm cat slowly forgets the farm and the farmer. One morning, the farm cat peers out of the grass and sees something in the middle of the country-road: it's a dead cat with a squashed-in head. The farm cat approaches the body and looks down at it the same way it once looked up at a man.
12.	Anxiety Poem 01:18	lyrics	buy track
Whatever the fuck I'm on this month, it's not working tonight. I feel like my body is sinking into my bed and my brain is sinking into itself and, if I don't keep them both tense, they'll never get back above water again. I fear I'll be blind in my own sunken skull. Writing this poem takes my mind off it a little, but the feeling is still there. I fear falling asleep and never waking. I fear turning thirty and shit getting worse. I fear having to be responsible for myself. I remember being boredly-unaware of the full extent of my own uselessness. Now I'm all-too-aware, but still not aware enough to be prepared. People get drunk and kill themselves trying to cope with being useless. I'm not cut out for homelessness or discomfort or having absolutely no money, but it's all probably what I'm gonna be. I suppose I ought to get ready for it and maybe study up a bit on dying.
13.	Anaxaminder 01:00	lyrics	buy track
11 × 12 the base of the skull Felix's rat in the corner crying crying a chandelier over Buckingham Palace the inopportune the Dallas Cowboys 62 rubles an unrelenting groundskeeper the field, the field the corn of Charlie's rictus-year animated voracious the delay of the Tennysonian rebirth actual actual the giving fruit the monastery of forced vegetation all the ladies -- every lady a song a song around the garden gates a rhyme for the penultimate age and the final, lucid wave
14.	Rest Assured 01:09	lyrics	buy track
Thinking again, are we? . . . Your face has that look again: a concentrated forehead and eyes, green with the disaster-light of articles bright on your phone in the bed beside me. This night of love, for you, is something else; this night holds you tenuously, like a mother with arms full: you're the swaddled baby that she could very well drop. Don't be that thinking brain for awhile. Be one with this soft bed and this peace-snug, song-aired night;. Take the sensation while it's here -- while it openly invites you into itself. I wouldn't go in when it called me and so, I missed out on happiness a lot and thought I just couldn't have any. I tried to teach myself not to need love, but you taught me how to be love instead. I think I can remind you of how it feels, if you'll let me.
15.	Medication Symptoms 00:33	lyrics	buy track
You say it felt like your head was full of cotton. I say it feels like a head full of chewed gum. I'm sure we're both close enough, but in the frenzy of the occasional panic attack, there's all the difference in the world between a head full of cotton and a head full of chewed gum: it's the difference between the stranger being just a noise from down the hall and the stranger really being in your house.
16.	Bow-Chicka-Wow-Wow Poem 00:42	lyrics	buy track
I'm not one of these people (and I'm grateful for that), but something's somewhat appealing about lovers who not only still fuck each other after years and decades, but have moved beyond the mere clutch of tits and cunts and cocks and balls and asses to a phase in which it is more a ritualistic interlocking of bodies; a transferring of chi; almost non-sexual, and yet, closer than all other kinds of love.
17.	New Books 01:14	lyrics	buy track
I got some new books today and didn't feel much of anything. Usually, getting new books makes me feel energized, at least for awhile. I started reading one and still -- nothing. That's never happened before. I think my Prozac has stopped working. The doctor did say that might happen a couple months in. He may either have to up the dosage or put me on something else. I may have to start trying blends. The back of my head is starting to feel empty again like it did months before and my foot-tappings are back too. I'm afraid I'm epileptic or that my brain is gonna seize up if I don't keep my focus rigid and keep wiggling my bare toes like the incessant, flapping wings of some headless bird. Shit to get you to forget, shit that doesn't make you less crazy, shit that just makes you able to live with being crazy, shit that just gets worse at doing even that much, shit to tide you over to the grave -- that's what it is.
18.	Jazz Poem 00:56	lyrics	buy track
Man, I tell you what: I've seen mountains risin' up out them seas like dogs, and ol' Fritz, my boy, what he wouldn't give . . . and it weren't no sassafras day, the day we went down -- down into that red canyon together, with Serengeti smiles and slathered, whitened tubes on display. We weren't knowed Hell like it be. Ain't the way fraught? Ain't it? I'm up in them mountains always when I come to think of it and sometimes the music is so purple and messaging like evening winds, I'm simply good -- excited, even -- and other times, it's all insensate and I can't feel like I belong anywhere in the world. What it be to know, and to ain't know . . . man. . . I'd tell ya.
19.	Outro 00:19		buy track

about

"How to Enjoy Being Dead" is a collection of poems I wrote. Here, I read them for you. The texts for the poems can be found in the "lyrics" section under each track.