What happened to you sickle moon
You used to loom so large, perched on the horizon
Now you’re diminished by the stars
Hanging there in the middle of the night sky without a friend
Makes a man want to bring on home his head in his hands
The folk singer sings to an empty room his lonesome songs
A couple in the corner are making noise but they ain’t singing along
Another show for the books and I guess this one goes to say
Just call him a singer-songwriter
These songs ain’t for the folks anyway
Piano lady introduced a song she could not explain
She told me it was a boogie-woogie ballad with a honty-tonk refrain
But it sounded more like the stolen words from a long-forgotten, foreign bet
When she said she’d come from the city tonight
And do you have a Native cigarette
Outside your window the coyotes have started howling
The dumpster is getting filled with trash and your neighbours have gone out prowling
For yesterday’s promise of tomorrow’s cash
With a lightning rod
I thought it couldn’t get no worse till they said
Cash ain’t king, it’s god
They’re no different than the thugs and the scabs and the cops that we’ve always had
Who would pick you up and shake you down and drop you just as fast
The spoiled youth of a spilled seed
We’re slave to ingrained sense of greed
We all want to die easy but this stubborn life precedes
Do you deem yourself alive, or awake in a nightmare
Well now, who controls the strings decides
How and when those strings will wear
It must be what’s roaring through the blood of a young man
That catches him in tortured throes of desperation and
What makes a head so heavy that it needs a loving hand
credits
from Hophorn Hornbeam,
released August 28, 2020
Piano by Charline Daigle
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