My Time Outside the Womb
The first thing you see is the light.
Then, you focus on a man in a mask with a knife
as he cuts you away from everything you thought you knew about life.
And now you’re in your mother’s arms, wrinkled and wet.
You’re gonna spend the rest of your life trying to hard to forget
that you met the world naked and screaming, and that’s how you’ll leave it.
In Riverside Hospital,
this was on a July morning, with a push and a pull,
and this is how I found out I wasn’t quite so invulnerable.
It put the fear of God in me when I heard my daddy say,
“one mistake is all that it takes.”
I ended up at Central School, 1993,
and met a certain kid named Sarim at the library.
He said, “they’re ain’t nothing about this place that’s elementary.”
I learned to play the guitar in the seventh grade
in order to convince everyone I was a renegade.
That’s when I learned, in Glen Rock, everybody calls a spade a spade.
I couldn’t fool anyone. I couldn’t even fool myself.
I was just another book on the shelf.
Nothing else.
notes:
The band is from Glen Rock, New Jersey. Central School is an elementary school in town.
Also, Sarim refers to Sarim Al-Rawi. He’s a former drummer and is credited on Airing of Grievances as “vocals, percussion”. He’s actually listed first, so that some reviews assume he’s the lead singer (he’s not). He also has a “recorded by” credit on the Every Time I See the Light b-side to the Merok Titus Andronicus 7″.