The Extinction Museum

Lyrics

The Extinction Museum Exhibit #357 Twenty-three wax cylinders of Tennyson Reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade" c.1890 Poetry should cut It should cleave We crave the needle and the ax When Edison sent his agents round to Tennyson's house They transported the wax cylinders in leather and pasteboard cases Chemical smelling, weeping black in the rain It took four thousand dusk-colored beetles To make the dye to stain the cowhide And four trees to shape thе ribcage of the boxes Thе trees were cut from forests in the north, on a different continent Floated down rivers, barked against barges Pulped by steel teeth into new matter Tennyson's voice was two years removed from disappearance His fingertips probed the wax as the agents tried to explain the mechanics of sound His knuckles left a ridge in the recording that thumps like a man clapping Tennyson demonstrated his understanding of sound seven times for them before they were satisfied The beetles were collected at night by children paid half-wages They were shy creatures in search of each other Their skins just beginning to harden The Extinction Museum Exhibit #100 Embalmed whale rigged to the side of the ship Where it floats in a lifelike manner Inside the great beast We clasped hands, shared the last cigarette Its glow like our love traveling back and forth Our breath made visible We were bad luck, two wrongs, a scourge When we fucked, locusts descended When we went on a date, a plague of frogs appeared Everything we touched sank Until we ourselves were cast overboard We begged to be sacrificed, but the world still burned The beast's thunderous heart was louder than the storms outside Jonah was off in the entrails somewhere, collecting lamp oil Geppetto and Pinocchio took turns building a raft out of splinters of their flesh I saw Adrienne Rich wearing an oxygen tank You claimed D.H. Lawrence had set up a seismograph in the nether regions When we kissed, the giant body rolled and water poured in It was then we learned how to swim