American Jericho

Lyrics

I walked around the hospital six times and still the bricks did not fall, and still no one came to ask if I would like to come in. Though I prayed, and though I walked around the hospital six times more and still the doors did not open, and the bricks did not fall, and my grandfather probably laid those bricks sixty years ago, and still I cannot enter. Once, I walked six times around his buried bones in reverse and he was not reassembled out of the earth, not returned to me or my blood circling always inside me, music through the trumpets outside Jericho, and the darkness blown out of them, as if to shout me too down to rubble. I walked around the hospital twelve times and still the bricks did not fall, and only dust gathered in my throat, and still no one came to ask if I would like to come in, though I looked each shift change in the eye, though it was below freezing, even as the sun began to rustle out of the concrete. If we are each a city of sin then this pulse rattling inside me is just a clock counting down. A single note blown forever until it isn't, that is. Until the river dries. There is a bible verse in which the people circle a city until it falls to the ground. There is a bible verse in which the blood circles inside the body until the body falls dead in the street. I know, I wrote it. It is comprised of my dead friends, and all their memory. Let me read to you now from the Book of Stephen. The Book of Jay, the Book of Don, of Susan, of Big Bob and Sean, let me read to you in the pitch of bricks being laid by my dead grandfather and his dead hands as he builds a hospital his grandson cannot afford to enter. I will tell you the story of each grain of dust washed from his back until his own body was washed out along with the water into the earth. Twenty-eight years, and each day I'm this close to opening the kingdom of dirt, and this day I'm walking around the hospital at two am- because I think I am dying and want to be dead-then three, then four am. How American, all this fear. This trembling ground.