Mixed-Up Southern Fried Confessional Blues

My chest, she bears a heavy load
My chest, she bears a heavy load
It’s all I can to do to slouch or to stand
Got so many problems and whisky tumblers drowning in me
And there’s no one in my apartment to pull me by the hand

My back, it is marked with many blows
My back, it is marked with many blows
And so many chimpanzees, it’s a wonder I can hardly breathe
For my previous transactions, the banker had one final payment to bestow
He had me balance out his equations so that they evened up to three

My hands are bent like crooked bows
My hands are bent like crooked bows
They don’t play good anymore, and almost never seem to agree
This one hand wants to work for art’s sake
But the other one is palming up for the fee

My feet got all twisted together in two
Not sure how it happened, except that my ankles got wasted—

that my toes were tipsy is a claim without basis—

It’s hard to disagree, yet so I put my word to the wood
If only it were animate, how swiftly it’d be sued
To a sentence endlessly recycled, never starting to conclude

My head, so battered and bruised
Got kicked around like a tomato can—

a more manly metaphor—like a wrestling man—

In any case, the jokes between she and I got rougher
But as dark as mine were, hers were even gruffer
Until her punchline like a battering ram left me dazed and confused

My spirit—Halleluiah—is alive and it is free
As my pastor the scientist said to me (and I’m sure you’ll agree)
That it remains most untouched by interminable temporality
The words he said might be true, or else they might be wack
Yet despite the woes inside my chest and all upon my back
And all throughout my hands and outside my feet and beyond my head

I prefer the pain of all of it to the fact of being dead.