Claws in Your Back by Julien Baker with poetry from Hanif Abdurraqib at Eaux Claires IV

[Hanif Abdurraqib]
I get the lyric wrong and in my head I rewrite the song to whatever you have newly determined it to be. And I did not know by how you rolled over right as the cardinal, covered in ruins of its labor, drifted away and the tree newly naked and stripped to its barest layer. I only knew, when thinking of Gram Parsons, and how a suit was sown for him when he was twenty-one and on the suit, there were bursts of red poppy flowers and how the resin from the pod of thе poppy makes morphine possible and how Gram Parsons sat undеrneath a dark sky at Joshua Tree when he was twenty-six, and how he had been clean for months but wanted to see the stars puff up, the round cheeks over the sand, which in that hour must have looked like pearls, and how I do not need to tell you that he did not survive the night

[Julien Baker]
Collecting the circles
That tell us how old we are
Beneath our eyelids

Wearing a purple badge
To prove what I did
Pump the vitals out of my wrists

Cause I'm conducting an experiment
On how it feels to die

[Hanif]
And to adore near south of the tolls of your eventual undoing is not by itself romance, and to wear your demise across your own shoulders is not by itself romance, but like the poppy, I have become something more dangerous than I was once. And this is how I have learned my heart’s worst fears. How each small misery could be something which takes us away from each other. I knew this way, too. I have dreams about planes crashing and houses on fire and in the dream I am both the watcher and the sufferer. It can be said that this is love. To imagine all of the worst separations. Forgive me, for I am being too literal again. Let me try something else. Love is not the drug itself, but the fluorescent hull that splits the earth in the names of its blooming. Not the drug, but the object so beautiful it demands to be stitched into something which the body can consume. What I meant to say when I could not bring myself to wake you. I imagine the cardinal tears away the layers of that which holds it up to ensure everything underneath is real. You leave and atop my sink a makeup remover holds a memory of you. And the toothbrush dripping the small pond into a contour porcelain holds a memory of you. And the mug on the table with the stain of lipstick shaped like the crescent of a blood moon holds a memory of you. Gram Parsons had his body set on fire at Joshua Tree and today people say the ashes still blow into their hair and their eyes, and God, what a miracle. All I have been trying to say is this: may even the residue of our love find the curve of wind to dance and echo into

[Julien]
Try to stay calm
Cause nobody knows
The violent partner you carry around

With claws in your back
A rip in your clothes
Listing your failures out loud

It's more than the skeleton next to my coat
The black that I held in the back of my throat
Come follow me straight into the dark
The easy way out and the hardest part

When it won't leave me alone
Cause I’m better off learning how to be

[Hanif]
Oh stranger, it seems like we have kept each other alive for another impossible season. Oh stranger, in the country I have built for us there are no storm clouds. Oh stranger, in the country I have built for us, every cloud is shaped like a moment from our childhood where we felt no pain. Oh stranger, the ice is melting and the animals are growing thinner by the year. Oh stranger, with my face in your palms, turn my eyes to the shrinking horizons. Oh stranger, I did not want to get out of bed today because someone I love was in it next to me. Oh stranger, I am out of excuses for this trembling world and its vanishing. What I have is two hands and I want nothing more than for one of them to find yours on a narrow street where the trees crane their green mouths to whisper secrets in each other's ears. While the lawns hum and flick water into the sunlight. Oh stranger, let's make our own ending just once, before all other endings come for us

[Julien]
Living with demons that
I've mistaken for saints
If you keep it between us
I think they're the same

I think I can love
The sickness you've made
Cause I take it all back
I changed my mind

I wanted to stay
I wanted to stay