Someone asked me recently about the tattoo on my right bicep, artwork that depicts Lily's footprint at birth encircled by cursive text. The writing is the final two sentences of lyrics from a defunct, but forever favorite band of mine from Baltimore, the oft overlooked and most certainly underappreciated (not by me...to a fault, perhaps) Lungfish. I've written of them before and spoken of them ad nauseam.
Yes, I know that band lyric tattoos have become a modern day cliche but this world as inhabited by humans, frankly, is a magnificent bundle of such things and she who is without guilt, well, you know what to do.
Digression. As the years pass, the words of Creation Story mean more not less to me. Like any well-written lyrics, the words are widely open to interpretation, to bending, to repurposing as fits the listener. This song continues to help tell the story of civilization as I believe it to have been, its evolution and regression throughout the millenia, while helping to explain and express the teensy part I feel I play in its current production. With each passing day, I find more truth in the song, more connections and even closer connection to "now".
I will share the lyrics and a link (from the title) to the song. Know that it is poem, more than song, but filled with rhythm and music that earns it, in my eyes, the title of song.
You may read or not, listen or not, but know that when you cross my path, be it on the trail, in the workplace or on city streets, these very words dance behind my eyes and interweave around the voices and sounds I hear, the images that I see, and help to filter my processing of those messages and instruct my responses.
Songs are rarely written expressly for any one listener, but the best of them seem to be uniquely adapted for every listener.
Resolved in Lily Harper and Piper Bea I shall live.
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Creation Story by Lungfish (lyrics by Daniel Higgs)
Paranoia warped into a gravity.
Which spread a smothering blanket on an evolutionary launch pad.
Vision was tested on blank sky and voice said, "Let me tell you about the time that something occurred."
Medication caused an ear to hear and a conflict of interpretation arose.
Landscapes were drawn from a plague of particles, and the burden was distributed.
The law would return as inflated skins.
While music initiated architecture.
Animals, living through a velocity of fear began to modify their behavior to comply with human observation.
Thus dropping a keystone into the eggshell honeycomb of anthrocentric history since.
As for the plants, they had been with the music.
Science procured a steepled shell dressed for immortality, hollow to hold the music.
Emotion repelled all opinion and refused to consider it's origin.
Apples happened bringing acids and enzymes, the spinning recorder disguised as an endless bouquet.
Things became erotic at the drop of a hat.
A tyrant placed an apple on a table and lorded over it.
As a fish realized it held a monkey inside itself and expelled it on the beach in a larval salamander form.
The voters clamored for more circles and the whole rig began to rotate.
Books were used for fuel and money and everybody was writing them.
The planets turned inside out to expose their freight.
No charges were pressed because all involved agreed that they could die.
These are secrets a world sung to me truer than the truth.
A young order of birds that eats the eyes of believers.
Science predicted forms of worship and reveled in them.
An orgy of mutation took place for many years.
Between stones, near water, and inside clouds.
The people bound their feet with the skins of the animals to trample their own cities and each other.
They developed external organs like guns and television sets.
They believed that they owned things.
One mind in a generation will hear the eternal broadcast of the voice saying, "Let me tell you about the time that something occurred."
And that mind's body will be strapped down and that body's mind will subject to testing or electric currents rippled through the brain.
But the music pervades.
It was music that gave the shove.
And resolved in music we shall breathe.
It was children that crafted a parent.
And resolved in children we shall live.
