Sick Days Are Upon Us - Kill the Vultures

Layers of scalp under manicured nails

And a matador stands in his death ballet

Cellos bellow like workers on break

Once devout to the catchers of prey

Seasons a day, hunters with tools

King of king need to hire a fool

To laugh and smile and wipe his drool

I slit his throat while he slept with his queen

The jester is me, the laughs of the creek

Smoking Newport’s and drinking the V

O them days, the woe to the sick

Could sleep through a war and wake when it ends

Make peace with the Lord, the priest and the Pope

The industry stole your ideas and eloped

The mind is simply a terrible thing

Applied to these eyes, born with a squint

We’re in the part of the country where the radio buzzes

But we don’t turn it off 'cause we fear the sound of nothing

Heat even makes a noise like bugs humming

Rubbing their legs together indicating hunger

It’s all around us

Like developing resentment between small-towners

Fall down as quick as you stand

Dehydration, hallucination, sicker than

A sick man licking his hand

React to the cricks in the thick of the land

Hear the stones sticks shifting again

Like old bones in a rickety man

I said we’re all destined for stomach rot

Sugar eats the teeth of crumbs that numb the plot

Of brittle hair hovering over their eyes

That don’t see nothing but culture’s disguise

I scan the room on a sick day

Looking for objects upon which to fixate

Sick days are upon us now

Sick days are upon us now

Sick days are upon us now

I tried to warn ‘em, teach ‘em even beg ‘em

Now the epidemic is spreading again

I walk with metal pipes for legs, unsettled life a dread and yellow nights

That bred unleveled types

Bled in rebel fights at bars in ghetto heights

Scars from Stiletto knives, stars were the devil’s eyes

Look at the meadow rise, making the town flood

Praising the brown mud and praying it drowns us

Fucked from the ground up, nobody comes 'round

Watch men floating up the river at sundown

Widows hold on to a blood stained sermon

Not ready to give husbands to the fire

Feeding a green corpse to prolong the burden

Lifting the limbs up with pulleys and wires

We’re walking dead not given proper burial

Cursing reptiles for the skin they can shed

Packing more bodies than a cemetery holds

Every time that it rains the streets are stained red

Turns my blood into blue ice

If I don’t tell my story, my tomb might

Hounds of hell with bloodstained tongues

Sound the bells when Sunday comes

Birds fall out the sky and hit hydrants

We only pray to God when we’re sick and dying

Everybody looking for the source of the plague

Maybe fleas from the rats or the sores on our hands

We now tell time by the cries in the air

Better off digging up coffins and hiding in there

Dead-bolt locked tight 'cross my door

Hear 'em clawing at the wood, fingernails on boards

Sick days are upon us now

Dear God please bring the tall winds down

Rid me of a never-ending night of decay

Everything that breeds illness upon this ground