Note that the youtube link on this page refers to the spoken word version of the song, also known as Dead Cat Clear (1)
[Verse 1]
I never swung a wooden sword
At slow bees…
Kept something dying in a box beneath
A bed my father’s father built neath me…
Never fed a mare honey nor seed from my hands
Or held a harp…
These things would melt me
And then, they would have wung me…
Doth the dark precede you
Or simply punk you near ledge, treasure, and lover
In your swift and ample
Doth You stay this sort of motherfucker…
You were amiss before stained glass
Its punishments never pointed at you
Yet you held on bare legs the news paper
Cured body of a deadened cat
Below a porch beside a boulevard
And in all that softening dark
You would return to see it’s sucked flesh
Pulled by days of dirt and degrade from the gentle
Center of its lower jaw…
And you saw
All that was soft to it now had left…
Only Eyeholes, claw and cracking flesh
And it was beautiful before you…
Made you cry and beg for what the day entrusts you…
Made you cry and harden
[next line not in song but written down by Doseone]
Finally you’d been given answers you could understand…
You in the lowlight
It in the dark
The coal below all rules and human hides…
Blew white before you in your boyhood…
As you made a pact with depths that you could never make with other children… [sung as "other kids"]
[Hook]
It’s become dead cat clear
I strap no gat to bring the sun back…
[Verse 2]
Yet you never pet tarantula by blacklight, by a knife collection…
Never took your father’s belt across your face…
Mother’s disease into your breast…
And were you asked at such young age, to spend a year of weeks
Beneath the earth asleep beside either of your grandfathers gone, you would have…
They say the first year of decomposition is most noticeable
Much like and infant quickens to its future self…
And you would talk to their husks in the wheeze of your sleep child chest
And give them grace as they fall to a simpler thing
Of compounds and languaglessness…
Where things are slowed
Respectfully
Respectively…
Where clear it goes…
[Hook]
[Bridge / Verse 3]
Tonguing a loose tooth for the blood taste from your gums
Thinking in child alchemy, free of your sum, free of your numbs
Your eyes grinding light from the dark’s slights
Weaving what’s leaking through the porch wood into sight…
When last you met your pet with death
You slipped two triple A’s into its brittle throat..
Wrapped it in newer news print with your hopes…
And buried it forever
In a ply of fading press and yankee boxscores or…
As forever
As decomposition takes it…
[Hook]
DeadCatClearII was written by Themselves.
DeadCatClearII was produced by Themselves.