Ode To Pete Wentz, Ending In Tyler’s Funeral

Lyrics

There is already more than enough blood in your city tonight and yet I know you are at the edge of another tower of speakers, stacked higher than the dead boys pulled from the southside and forgotten. To jump knowing you will be caught is a type of mercy I have never known, yet craved. You can love a whole scene until it becomes a flooded house, and then I suppose climbing is the only option. Still, we wore all black every summer like the sun didn't snarl. Didn't have teeth, never wanted to tear into our skin and let the salt of us pour out in waves, or like our skin wasn't suspect enough before we decided to be rebels. Before we walked into corner stores with no money and walked out with chocolate melting against the warmth of our thighs. We wrote "IGNORE YOUR GOD COMPLEX" in every bathroom stall on Campus one of those years even though we knew the right lyrics, because on a night we were too poor afford concert tickets we pressed our backs into a hill overlooking the LC and let every sound arrive in our spines and throb, and the way Patrick's voice swung into the air when singing "Loaded God Complex", we couldn't tell the difference, just knew we discovered a message that had to be delivered on the walls of places where people emptied themselves of everything they challenged their body to own. In those days, we were drunk on reaching up and pulling the night sky apart, swallowing it in chunks, until we were as dark inside as we were out. Until it held us tight like no one else dared to. We boys and our misery, Pete. I know you fumble over your instrument. I know your trembling hands approach the strings like a virgin lover, reaching to pull fabric from the edge of the first person to whisper their desires in an ear, but if not for the bass, how else would they allow you to arrive to our outstretched arms? Who else would we have to drag us home by the collars with the windows down on 270 after another set of hours in a Midwest that is not like the one in your songs, but if we turn up the music loud enough we can pretend they aren't breaking our old neighborhoods into swarms of dust. We can pretend there aren't boys running out of scattered glass temples, with their hands raised, begging for someone to open their chests and let the heat unthaw whatever happiness they have left. And I know these are just my problems, I know there is blood in your city that craves the rush of a cold sidewalk every night, that there are so many ways to stop a city from breathing all at once, to twist it into something sharp and metal and turn it in on itself, and you can't possibly fit another tragedy in a song after all these years, can you? Not even for one of us who fell so in love with his own loneliness that it became a flooded house and he climbed like you did to the edge of a rooftop with wet shoes and jumped because Pete, when you were lonely and you jumped, we sang and held you up to the roof and you survived another night, and then another year, and you named a son something ridiculous, and we did not have to bury you underneath a split tree in Columbus. But we still wore black then and every summer after, we still stole candy bars and planted them on a hill outside the LC and prayed for them to melt this time into the ghosts of everyone we have ever loved, and would never see again. Then we lost so many friends that we truly became criminals, and rummaged through this splintered city to find god because a man outside of a bar convinced us all of our friends were in heaven and none of us knew any other way to get there saddled by all of these sins and all of this sadness. Until one night, drunk off the sky again, we figured maybe we can all get to heaven if we ignore our god complex. Maybe if we stack all of the speakers in this town as high as we can and begin to go up, we can escape even this.