We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Our Home Is a Deathbed

by XERXES

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD

     

  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Horseback Brown

    Includes unlimited streaming of Our Home Is a Deathbed via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days

      $20 USD or more 

     

1.
Wake 01:24
2.
Sleep 00:41
It was a headache that woke me up, a motor running in the garage, The knife left in the median where west met east and I walked between. The lights left off in my room, and the empty bottle clanking home, and nobody knows the rush of touching her hand and the sweat. Slow and deliberate, it was the rhythm of a choice. The lights and the noise, cold cheeks by dawn. Press play and wait for day, the same repeating song. And it won't sound the same. I'm already gone. I'd leave the pages open were there anything to read. I'd walk the line for longer but don't know where it leads. The engine laid its blanket over me, but it was your voice that put me to sleep.
3.
Im sleeping through the day again, with the light from your window making shapes of your face on the wall. And I don't wish you were here, but I'm noticing with no defense a light that doesn't go off. So give me time to reconcile my reality and the peace I can't touch, because while I'm sleeping my faith still never comes close enough. I've fought off the uncertainty in believing your love would return to me. I'm promised to a feeling thats as far away as the distance I should keep. And I wish that I could hold on to something that lasts, but all I have is the day and it will fade away with the light you put out in the depth of your heart when you turned your back. So give me time, because I need the sun to extinguish when I close my eyes. I need the clouds to remind me that love will always hide. I need the night to remind me love's there, but on the opposite side of my life, drowning in an ocean with its hands tied.
4.
My bed hasn't seen me since the young summer sun watched our cruel blood drive ahead of us, with its hold on our wrists, cold steel and clenched. Two years of warm moons behind us, and I've made deep prints in the grey silt, standing south of the cold stream, bleeding wild, like the lonely weathered street that should have taken me. I won't believe I've slept because the bed I've kept is that driven pavement, droning lullabies that can't bring me back. And each solstice's sun another red reminder of the youth we should have had but gave away for the pain and the struggle of finding it on our own. And maybe the streets aren't paved anymore with the dying days of our childhood. I'll waste the sunlight tracing this pavement searching for an answer, for some feeling I almost knew. But there's no answer in the braille of worn asphalt. There's no response from the lines where our bones broke. With my ear to the floor, I'll listen for a heartbeat, but the only sound is wheels spinning free. Overturned, eyes closed, stained red, our home is dead.
5.
Fever Dream 02:49
And I sweat out your fever dream, but it's heat's still painted on me. I wear you like a sketch of an incision, a cut not deep enough to bleed. If there's an honest answer out there, its that I've lingered too long. The ghost of you I thought I knew for so long was always gone. / There's silence in my eyes, but there's a heat in your heart. I left my voice on the wind, it tore my words apart. And pieces of this were best left scattered, like the ashes of someone loved but lost. And if I found it buried in the soil, I wouldn't dig for the purity. Its a shallow grave sometimes I think it's ready for what's left of me.
6.
I can hear your voice, its like a siren repeating. “These walls are waterlogged with the weight of a childhood, the secrets we keep in the drawers of our dressers. We slept in beds that were broken in half, rearranged while we dreamed of windows caving to the pressure from the storms the summers would bring. You’re like the leaves, staining portraits of your absence in the concrete. We walk the path wishing you’d return like the red season we watched you leave. The air was cold then, your breath made a map of your movement, it was an unsure cloud, as wandering as the words you locked inside it.” I would sink in that heat if it would take me like your arms Make a grave for me, if you'd trace my epitaph from the shapes of the clouds. Its this silence I've been walking through, I can't see my reflection through. This season's like an ocean, but it won't let me drown. Its too cold to breathe, but I can't make the shape of a home through the fog in front of me,
7.
February 01:10
February forgot me, and I swore, myself, I wouldn't give my conscience the chance to look back. But if you're asking me now: I'd rather see you as the ice in my veins, so I could watch you until you disappeared. If you were standing by me as I walked away you could have kept me if you wanted me here. But at least I'm making strides where the trail is cold, my hands curled fast around the warmth I hold. Sometimes its like a brick behind my throat, now its the heat from her skin, beneath her clothes.
8.
Disconnected from the gravel in the alleys that taught our throats to sing, I miss these streets and how they used to hold me like the bedroom in the suburbs where I used to sleep. This city built it's lights like a cradle for the desperate youth, but when we left it was a wasted bed, worn to death by the bodies of our darkest nightmares and the memories our coldest sweats. And i don't know if I could sleep again, this place has killed our dreams. I traced a map on the back of my hand, but i still can't see. How did we lose our way? I feel like the rain, raising the water by day, and soaking river road with the memory of what used to be. Maybe it was me that pulled the tide, so when the pressure gets too high, I can disappear at the water's edge, so i can swim in my own regrets. But we're still separated from the river that left us here, we grew by the silt from the floodplain, but we withered to grey in the sun, our veins too swollen to stay shut. We're the waters that dried up, we're the blood that was lost. We're the flood that returned unrecognized, we're the homes that never forgot.
9.
Funeral Home 03:00
There's a heartbeat in everything, and I'm holding my hands to the wall. The feeling won't come easy but it's the fire underneath that I want. And I can feel the flames crawling their way up the sides of my throat. Its not a drink in a glass, it's a hand on the stove. Its knowing not to come home. So when it swallows me, I hope the black cloud billows like the sound of sirens running through the neighborhood. So send the ashes of my bedroom to my last known address. I'll spread the dust of my childhood over the street i've been left with. I'll leave the urn open to the rain, spill it on the page, cross out the ink of yesterday . If theres a fire left in me, pour out my contempt and wash it away. If that is all it takes to keep me at bay, I'll smolder until the embers in my eyes fade. And if the fire shrouds this place in grey, remind me not to look away. There's a match behind my ribcage, desperate to catch. I'm pulling smoke from my eyelids, but tears are all that's left. If there's a spark left on my tongue now, I'll feed it until it's passed. If there's air left in my lungs now, I'll breathe it like my last.
10.
When you hit the water, I hardly knew. When the sunlight changed, through the waves, you say, there was a song it sang. I still say I could see what you saw that day. How the lights were so different, but felt the same. Maybe I could hear you scream, I still have that dream, I’m still sleepwalking, my feet wet in the stream. It starts at your fists, under your clutch, but it escapes and ends up, at the place between your shoulders that I never touch. Before I left I said, Nothing can stay. You know the past has a way of breaking up these days into pieces that never fit quite the same. But I’ll hold this together even with the edges frayed. I could feel my fingers graze the air your lips betray. Like a dying flame, screaming with smoke until it fades for that feeling when you're alone, its a cloud that surrounds, and it holds you now because I don’t. And when I wrote, I hoped love would save you, I meant mine. And I dragged my palms through the gulf of your dreams, just hoping your song would play for me too. And when i wrote, I hoped love would save you, I meant mine. And I dragged my palms through the gulf of your dreams hoping your song would play for me. And when I wrote, I still feel alone, you were watching me write, I just didn’t know.
11.
There's a gentle wind catching me. You're calling my name and it feels something like home. I can feel the quickened pulse of an open door, the calm of a quiet bed. I can feel your arms pulling me in.

credits

released March 13, 2012

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

XERXES Louisville, Kentucky

contact / help

Contact XERXES

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like XERXES, you may also like: