| Well, I went in for some medicine
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| Feelin' like a wounded soldier, deathly pale and a woman did come to my bedside
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| A regular Florence Nightingale
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| But my girlfriend just wasn’t having the comparison
|
| So I back-pedaled, said «okay then, how bout Mary Magdalene?»
|
| Anyway, I was reminded of a dream I had as my confidence came and went
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| Where all the girls from the 90's
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| Were singing «Just Around the Riverbend"all along the banks of the Arkansas
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| And I paddled through in a dugout canoe
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| I was a John Smith cartoon, with a strong jaw
|
| Listen I’m white, middle-class and male and the dream does tell a tale
|
| Of Whiteness dreaming of Whiteness
|
| With a want for wisdom that might tip the scale cuz my friend and I felt an
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| affinity
|
| With the tribes in the documentary
|
| That plays on a loop in the backmost wing of the Museum of Natural History
|
| But my imperialist didn’t suddenly die he just loosened his tie and took a knee
|
| and Disneyland never made a man
|
| That’s all just false idolatry that’s all just false I-
|
| Florence Nightingale
|
| Comes in with a lamp, they say
|
| On stormy nights when the wound’s remembering
|
| Talks to me about that photograph
|
| Me and my brother on the sidewalk
|
| Holding squirt guns and squinting in the sun,
|
| That was the summer I was nine
|
| Well it’s a sunny day
|
| At Sugar Sugar High School
|
| And the quarterback and track star are cuttin' class and shootin' pool well
|
| this is not to say that they should be in class
|
| Still why they have to be such assholes? |
| It’s as if we men just want to be
|
| Picked up sequentially
|
| And held to the breast of a giantess who stands ten miles out at sea
|
| Or, alternatively, we could find success
|
| You know really be the best then maybe we could rest upon our father’s knee
|
| Florence Nightingale
|
| Comes in with a lamp, they say
|
| On stormy nights when the wound’s remembering
|
| Talks to me about that photograph
|
| Me and my brother on the sidewalk
|
| Holding squirt guns and squinting in the sun, that was the summer I was nine
|
| Mary Magdalene
|
| Was at Golgotha, they say
|
| She saw the water separate from the blood and I look at that painting
|
| Of him hanging so peacefully with Mary by his bleeding side that was the summer
|
| he was 33 |