No Sides - Bad Books, Manchester Orchestra, Kevin Devine

Draw your five short breaths and pretend it’s meditation

To your showerhead higher power: «Gimme patience

Make me nobody’s robot, make me nobody’s slaughtered lamb

Deliver me from evil;

open me as best you can.»

Play your cracked guitar for the Boston Occupation

Ditch your blindfold drift;

aimed at aimless destinations

Watch the wakened assembly live principled, righteous lives

With your heartbeat through set cement: «Honored to be here, guys.»

See it’s a slow crawl

At a new wave

And if you feel small

Don’t, babe:

Whenever you’re alone, you’re not

You wait in line, cycling finished conversations

Straighten out the stories, edit out the faces

You’re lost in the file when the cashier catches your eye

Summon up a smile, come back to earth and mumble, «Hi, Hi, Hi»

And it’s connected

On a timeline

It’s a circle

No sides

At the same point where it starts, it stops

Out on the back lot you wanted for nothing

You sat with your hands full, the future was open:

A dreamt southwestern sky

A moon-drenched island night

A newborn day, awake and alive

Now it’s a nightclub

With a guest list

And uh-oh-

Bad news, kid:

Whoever’s getting in, we’re not

So let’s start up our own, just us

Where anything we need, anything we need

Anything we need we’ve got