[ pos.pɾe'te.ɾi.to ]

Song for workers (three-syllable)
Temp Jobs

02. Bring your favourite room to work
At home it doesn't fit
You’ve carried it for long enough
Others may know what to do with it.

04. Bring your other face to work
It’s a near-flawless disguise
But if no one knew you anyway
You should not be surprised.

05. Bring your old ideals to work
Your anthems and your hymns
You do not want them any more
But your peers may well believe them.

06. Bring your flask of jack to work
Take five unwise swings
If your ankles start to burn
You might find you’ve grown wings

07. Bring your button eyes to work
And fail at all to see
Blindness may bring you sympathy;
Take what you can, it’s free.

08. Bring your fear of heights to work
It’s quite a common excuse
But once you’re six feet underground
It won’t be any use

09. Bring your will to live to work
And note a causal change
As casually behind your back
Your days are rearranged

11. Bring your inner child to work
And start a fire at break
Only to find that in the chaos
There’s nothing you would want to save

12. Bring your poetry to work
And hide loose sheets around
—Though in folders, chairs, or ceiling tiles,
Be sure it will be found.

13. Bring your broken rules to work
To stack them in the trash
It’s better if you box them up first
You wouldn’t want to cut your hands

15. Bring your Marxist aunt to work
And scandalise the masses
They’ll act shocked only to forget
Before a full week passes

16. Bring your favourite tree to work
At home there's been a drought
Other people are a different country
Maybe they can help you out.

17. Bring your sousaphone to work
Find it somewhere to stand
You may never have learned to play
But somebody here can.

(Bring your unwritten songs to work
And start a band.)

as long as actually explaining and indexing poetry and songs is something i seem to be doing these days:

• i organise songs i write mostly by theme. this has resulted in having a rough idea of three things that will be albums as soon as i finish writing them.


• since i am me, they are all of course being written simultaneously (by "written simultaneously" we may mean "being left for dead for ten months out of the year or more, but together!")


• this actually started as a way to tell apart songs i was writing for the rock opera the short and graceless life of miranda clay from songs i wasn't

so now we have:

1. The Short and Graceless Life of Miranda Clay, a rock opera about a legally blind girl who dies in a car crash and her kind of terrible friends and acquaintances and hallucinating bereaved girlfriend and how they get themselves killed or ruined or out of the whole mess


2. Simon Says, an album in practice about reference jokes (it is where things like "i wrote an overqualified + a series of unfortunate events crossover as an allegory for the stages of mitosis" and "MOOOOM DOC SCRATCH WON'T GET OUT OF MY NARRATION MOM MAKE HIM STOOOP" go, and yes, i am not making either of these up, these are both legit songs i have written and am more or less pleased with, help) and in theory about the end of the world (hay simon haaaaaaaay) whether apocalyptic-scale or personal (or my favourite, both!)


3. [citation needed], an album about... things that aren't simon says, the way ss was about things that weren't TSGLMC. tentative theme is "optimistic futures, also religion", which is a bad approximation of an impression you can kind of only get in my head by flinging the people's key at automatic over and over again.

so because i've never done so before, i went through two years' worth of month-by-month writing folders and pulled up everything that looked songish. APPROXIMATE TRACKLISTS AHOY.

this is going to be long.

( because the things i do make sense. )

in retrospect i am pretty happy with 1025 being called 1025 (love will tear us apart), actually. it's more empathy will tear us apart, or possibly misplaced human decency will tear us apart, or indeed this omniscient asshole will definitely tear us apart, but as symbolism -- even if i nabbed the line from the evelyn evelyn cover, eheh -- i feel it works.

(1025, for those of you just coming in, is one of the two songs on simon says that is actually flagrant homestuck fanfiction disguised as something with meaning. that's the theme of simon says, flagrant in-jokes disguised as something with meaning: see also IPMAT, biology mnemonics disguised as the song version of a softer world; sprechen sie englisch?, a song about the handmaid that got us "is it about the holocaust?" from l; the queen is from, an allegory based entirely on david koresh superstar; citrus, which i wrote to be the backbone for indelicates fanfiction for god's sake; etc. the other theme is apocalypses!)

one time (february 12, 2012, actually) i sang 1025 at my dad and he thought it was a mountain goats song.

the lyrics ( are as follows: )

and, yeah, the only reason i posted this was because i realised saying i possess Feelings about one stanza without context didn't work

(oh, and i just checked, and the verse/stanza distinction i was raised with was correct, if by this point practically deprecated; i enjoy apocryphal anachronistic accuracy the very very best, so)

so now that you know the song, what i was going 'siiigh yeah okay that's decent' about was twice-damned child, you have not been / trying very hard, have you? / oh, and if you fall behind, / i can't imagine what i'll do

which has, if anything, echoes of the kind of thing i heard all the time, back when i had religion.

so.