Neck's Wet

All the way back from a faraway state
I’m smiling at waitresses clearing my place
The flicker of signs on the side of the road
And exits for places I’ll never grow old

You’re dozing off in a seat by my side
Playing home movies behind shuttered eyes
Of a beautiful family you can no longer feel
At my private altar I quietly kneel

To a god with a face like a new dollar bill
With a line out the door of the people he’s killed
In his wars and his cars and his hurricanes
Your hair’s dancing out the window, gathering rain

We stop at a beach just to stand in the surf
I examine your bones through the holes in your shirt
Until my chest tells me it’s again time to breathe in
The rest of my body too dumb to believe it

I curse and the breath is heavy with frost
You say what you say every time we get lost
“There are so many cities but only one road”
It’s under the tires and in the back of my throat

Burned into my eyes and in all of my dreams
It pours out of my mouth when I’m trying to speak
So I’m talking in brake lights and white dotted lines
You respond in atlases, we’re both doing fine

Feels odd to stand still when we stop for a leak
To see a human face again, to eat something cheap
I ask someone the time and the day and the place
They tell me a lot of words taking up space

We’re off again without a thought to anywhere we’ve been
I just don’t care to think about how long that I have lived
Those memories are back again, they’re whispering so loud
Ran out of conversation and now the only sound

Is a slowly dying radio churning out jazz
And a mournful, moaning engine thinks we’re going too fast
And every time we hit a bridge I harmonize my hum
Pass a little lady with two bags and two breasts and a thumb

When I’m filling my tank all my faculties collapse
From the tedium of driving or the smell of summer gas
Somehow these bring back to me my warm New Jersey nights
Sinking into bedsprings, but wanting to take flight

I used to hear Sister sing herself to sleep
Songs about changing the colors of leaves
But now she looks older and tired with life
And some stranger’s gone and made her his wife

And they fight in the home that I grew up in
Now I don’t really know where I live
It’s when my neck’s wet that I realize I’m crying
And the sound of a siren reminds me I’m driving