I saw a picture and I thought of you and the gloomy Christ on your bedroom door. A clown sits in a giant swing in the shadows high above the forest floor. The same tempera blare, the same tenebrous eyes that dogged your little friends around the room
Somehow you told yourself a secret joke and I envied you because I couldn't laugh. The house is burning and the clowns are down in the basement slaughtering a fatted calf, and as they crackle like thorns blazing under a pot, you cross your eyes and cross yourself and grin like its some sort of play we're in. Well, I was wrong, but I thought at the time that you were after that calfskin
Remember, sister, when the baby comes, that to miss the mark's the only mortal sin. Our father hit it running eggs for years to the local stores until the chains came in, and if he blackened at Christmas and totaled the truth, well, he'd find his way into the velvet booth
Starting to think something happened here in the dead of night when you and I were small. A man broke in and left a pile of gifts, took the Kennedys from the parlor wall, saying "I know that you're good for it brother," like all the shlubs who drive their own sun out to shine from nine to nine, park it downtown, rode home on the red line
I was alive when that blizzard hit. I don't remember but I've seen the Super-8s, people asphyxiating in their cars, and there was martial law in parts of some Northeastern states, and there's Miracle Car Wash, and you and your friends are making high-speed angels in the road
(Lyrics by Damon Waitkus)