For His Old Branches

There is a wheel that spins to keep the river flowing

It runs a course between your eyelids and your aching jaw

There was a bird that took your voice and turned it backwards

He and the past were aiming arrows at your heaving chest

You took a train into the mouth of all you hated

Spent half an hour watching hope pass through a window

You've got that singing crown of thorns around your thick head

You and the kid that you once were are fighting over it

Then we ran down the river Van

To the mouth of old Fenrir

And he swallowed us up)

I collected rocks, filled up my pockets

And tried to swim across the stream.

I was told I'd be kept afloat

By the ghosts of the hills that I'd flattened to get here.

Trusted a fiend and lost my hand.

My blood flowed white and filled the canyon,

And I saw faces in the leaves

And they were preaching to me

There is a tree you cannot cut

He knows your name and all your fears

You dare not lay an axe to his old branches

They dug a coal mine by your house

His yelling kept you up all night

All of your friends got caught between his black teeth

We left our shoes under the ground

Tied yellow feathers to our arms

And learned the language of the aching mountain

But now went out west to try to build a better version of myself

My iron tools got swallowed up by spirits

I knew my head was inside out so I sold my soul to taste the clouds

Ache from the trees started digging up the ground

There is a thought you cannot shake of her asleep under the lake

The ice is eating up the surface and you are the fish sleeping peacefully