Kootenai Ferry

KOOTENAI FERRY

They say there’s only winners & losers

But I never thought of you as one of them.

So what if the border guards put words in your mouth.

And your Exes tried to steal what’s within.

You were fragile you said & I knew what you meant,

What good’s a vanishing act if it don’t reappear.

How many times had you done that trick before?

Escape artists like you get lost in thin air.

It was time for a change & you know how some people see so clear

You feel naked in their sight.

In the excess of oblivion I cried like the sky for love

& you reached out across the poverty of tides.

I know all about love’s false interiors,

I keep walking into them thinking it’s you.

But it’s just another one of your exteriors.

Don’t you ever get tired of performing illusions.

Anything can happen,

Our souls they’ll work it out

Even when you’re apart from me..

You won’t give up your serenity.

When your speechless heart opens endlessly.

Like a tongue laid on your lips

makes a kiss forget the kisses it knew.

On Kootenai Ferry with you..

I met a woman like you once, she was a singer in the carnival

She could make the band stop playing when she danced.

You could hear a pin drop in the audience

The way she spun without a sound was so romantic.

But now the clowns are crying in their barrels at the rodeo

Because the singer took a stray bullet to the head.

There’s a thief in jail whose perfected the art of withholding his name

And a river with floating bodies of the dead.

When you least expect someone to open up for you,

Funny how the weight of the past disappears.

You can slip behind rocks where the silent waves break.

& still not know why you are here.

And the corridor leads to the garden

Where the roses smell of innocence.

Why lean on thorns when there’s nothing usual

Between the shores of Paradise & the Abyss.