Les Savy Fav

Pappa don't preach,
I beseech you man,
Your devilish deeds
Teach more than a teacher can.
What have we learned?
Which lessons won't stick?
Tracing the edges
Of wisdom and shit.

Knowing how the world works
Is not knowing how to work the world.

You're tracing its movements,
Predict its every turn;
You watch down from above
And record what you learn.
You're graphing the data
And tagging up our ears.
Complex simulations
With graph paper gears.

Wistful in his widow's peak,
So to speak, he stands.
A son confronts his father
With his hat in his hands.
All the things you never could do,
I never can.
All the things I blamed on you
I see I now do, too.

A handful of stories,
A house full of cards,
A mouthful of sorrys,
And a heart full up of scars.
I take a handful of you
And take a handful of me,
I put it in my mouth
And chew it up so thoroughly.

Hello
To my halo,
Goodbye
To my glands.
You can't
Move a mountain
With a book of plans.
You can't
Break a heart
With a
Birthday wish,
You can't
Make a wave
In a Petri dish.

Tell them
We think they're starving.
Tell them
We think they're deaf.
Tell them
We've seen them carving curse words
Into their desks.
Tell them
That I'm a liquid.
Tell them
It's been a gas.
Tell them
They're frozen solid
Just behind
The looking glass.

The mirror's just flat,
The mirror's just glass,
Into the mirror
Let's try not to pass.

Catching whispers on the phone
But the whispers get away.
Making entries in our diaries
With all the things we think they say.

Can you hear it?
I can't hear it!
Can you see it?
I can't see it!

We've been feeding the vermin,
Now they're hanging around.
Can't we take back the sermon
That we tossed to the crowd?
Obsessed with the excess
But stuffed with a crumb.
The lessons progress less
As professors succumb.
They're craving confusion
When starved of sense
And graven confusion
Has been heaven sent.

Can you do it?
I can't do it!
This is the way the sick people play:
Hands in their pockets, goose bumps on display.
This is the way the well people drink:
Mouths on the spigots of the sick people's sink.
In the town square,
In the city hall,
In the war room,
On a conference call,
They set the date to drop the bomb
And sit and wait with perfect calm.
I wanna do it!

If you call this living,
If you call that love,
If you'd call the cops before God above,
If you'd call the cops before God below,
If you call this culture,
Then I think you'll know,
The stone cold con and the 6-6-6,
We're trading our eyeballs in for asterisks.
We're trading our idols in for rapprochement.
We're burning the bridges that we're crossing on.
I wanna do it!

She was sweet sixteen,
Baby beauty queen.
Straight white teeth,
Bathed in beauty cream.
Priss don't drink
And priss don't smoke.
Shit don't stink
And don't take jokes.
Botoxed in bobby socks.
Cold as ice.
All the boys were like
White on rice.
The end result is still the same,
You can't go back the way you came.

Drunk on mint juleps on the tennis court,
The wealthy widow wanted more than sport.
The tennis pro thought it was inappropriate,
The wealthy widow thought that they should go for it.
She giggled, pickled, tanned as leather.
Sacks of sand in her cashmere sweater.
Oh Madame, the way you waste my time,
It's so divine.
Kissing the concrete you'd swear it was skin,
Her manicure secretes original sin.
Oh Madame, your taste for steak and wine serves to impress me.

You're so vain
You probably don't think this song is about you, Champagne Jane.

So many eager sinners, only 7 deadly sins;
Hell's so Goddamn crowded that there's no one getting in.
The line goes to the river Styx, but she can get you in.

It was work,
But the work was fun.
What will they say when they see what we done?
What will they say when they see what we do?
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-
One of us has got to go.
One of us has got to cum.
Bury me in mistletoe.
Put a dollar on my tongue.

You're so vain.

One was a piper.
One was a rat.
They couldn't decipher
How it came to that.
And at the cockadoodle
They crawled out of their beds.
As if the rooster knew
Each rising dawn they dread.
Lost in a flurry.
Looking for land mines
Hid in a ribcage
Back at the front line.
And when the sun is falling
They crawl out of their skins.
They hear the moonlight calling
Them from this mess they're in.

Take deep breaths and waste sweet seconds.
The late day beckons
And if you save it, it will slip away-
Spend 7 nights like Saturday.
Yawn, Yawn, Yawn,
We're all long gone.
If we get lucky we'll be dead by dawn.
So let's get it on.
I want to get it on!

Charging the windmill
And missing the mark.
Blinded by sunlight
But building an ark.
I've got 1,000,000 dollars
Made of 10,000,000 dimes
Paid for 1,000,000 failures
Of others' good advice.

The singer of the band
Has been encased
In a circuit board formed
From arsenic and old lace.
The piano has been dropped.
A c-note hits the cop.
So he would turn away
While we're cleaning up the slop.
This is the bishop's finger.
This is the bishop's hand.
Onto Jesus' body
The people place demands.
They're pointing with their pistols,
While we're reaching for the sky.
The soundtrack of their lives
Is an eye for an eye...

Hail hail the talk show,
Cocked after cocktails.
I lied and I lied...
God save the techno!
The sequencers don't know
When it died, when it died...

Edison put the gun in our hands.
The black bear put
The muzzle to its muzzle.
The dogwood didn't care
But the maple was troubled.
Trademark, this is a trademark,
This move was trademarked in 1883.

All nerve endings shut down.
Stiff lipped at the countdown.
All systems are go,
All systems are gauche,
All systems are ghosts.

In a can,
In a cupboard,
In a submarine,
There's nothing left inside.
In a basket at the bottom of the guillotine
Is where the sailor died.
He never said a word
To the jury or the press
And when the ax-blade bit his neck,
"Set me free" is all he said.

In a pixel,
In a portrait,
In a T.V. screen
There's nothing left to hide.
Stitched each instant by the firing electron beam,
Let the camera man decide.
And he never said a word
To the jury or the press
When the on-air light turned red,
"Cut Away" is all he said.

When she opened it up,
She dropped her coffee cup,
And when the cup hit the ground
The whole damn house came stumbling down.
Good by my memory.
From this point on I'm unsettling.

In Brooklyn we stay home.

All nerve endings shut down.
Stiff lipped at the countdown.
All systems are go,
All systems are gauche,
All systems are ghosts.

In a can,
In a cupboard,
In a submarine,
There's nothing left inside.
In a basket at the bottom of the guillotine
Is where the sailor died.
He never said a word
To the jury or the press
And when the ax-blade bit his neck,
"Set me free" is all he said.

In a pixel,
In a portrait,
In a T.V. screen
There's nothing left to hide.
Stitched each instant by the firing electron beam,
Let the camera man decide.
And he never said a word
To the jury or the press
When the on-air light turned red,
"Cut Away" is all he said.

When she opened it up,
She dropped her coffee cup,
And when the cup hit the ground
The whole damn house came stumbling down.
Good by my memory.
From this point on I'm unsettling.

In Brooklyn we stay home.

You're bringing us down.
Hear the symphony in the 5-man band,
Try to sympathize but you can't understand.

Set my mind to intervalometer,
It moves so slow from desk to dresser,
Hits the ground without a sound,
It took 5 years just to get down.
Who put up the flag?
We haven't got a door
Yet if they storm the fort tonight,
Leave your pistol by your bed.
We have jeopardized our situation,
Disengage the ammunition,
We are on a mercy mission.

Take away the golden epaulettes
From the fallen dead cadets.
Let their rank stand as their epitaphs,
Throw their bodies in the acid bath.

Drop the C-code and go for the gusto,
The man at the plant swears the foreman must go.
If the chief says, "Fight!",
Let the chief go ahead.
The squaw and the scout will stay in bed.
If the chief says, "Jump!",
I say, "Not I."
If the chief says, "Jump!",
I say, "How high?"

Rally up my friends
And stand by my bedside,
If I die tonight
Put my head inside a mason jar.
Put it in the ocean
And send it out to sea.
I'm wading because...
And when I hit some shore,
And when my seal is broke,
I'll split my eyes and lips asking,
"Is this a judgment or a joke?"

This is a chance to dissect it.
This is a chance to make it up.
These are the words we've selected.

Don't believe my lies
Of an afterlife spent drifting;
After 40 hours
I sank straight to the bottom
Of the harbor near my home
And there I lay alone,
The spider crab
Is finely clad
Beneath my cloak of brain and bone.

In the basement of the dress shop,
They play poker on the weekends.
Old men trading laces,
It's an absolute disgrace.
They never gave a tip
To the boy who ran the route.
They never gave a shit
What the paper was about,
But when they heard he died
They read the news that day
Just so they could see
What his obituary would say.
It said:
"Rally up my friends
And stand by my bedside!
Rally up my friends
And stay with me tonight!"

He's a bad mother fucker,
16 pairs of shoes in a closet
6 feet deep, and 6 feet wide, and 6 feet high.
Blackouts on Thursday!
Total blackouts are where it's at!
I'm going back to high school
Where I can make out like a cat.
It's a shake down.
A mental break down.
Is this a take down?
We're gonna make out.

The band sort of sucks,
But the audience sucks too much.
I'm going back to high school
Where the audience plays rough.

I got myself elected.
I got myself rejected.
I'm gonna run again.

Fav,
Les Savy Fav,
Les Savy Fav-
That's our name.

The first crack
Was invisible,
The next crack
Tears this thing apart.
The accident
Was at the rodeo.

We've got a problem at our camp,
We've got a problem with our math.
We want to figure something out,
We always have to write it down.

Gigantic spaces
Between the lines
Leave too much room to hypothesize-
If they ask us,
We'll have to blame our dads.

Cheerios like red blood cells.
My bowl is full.

The sweat descends.
The sweaty scents.
One cocksure fox
In a house of hens.
My mouth will water
Where the sweat descends.

The sweat descends.
Sweet decadence.
Let's hope this party
Never ends.
A shiv in the ribs,
Some smoke in the hive,
You live how you live,
I'll die how I die.

Wake me up when we get to heaven,
Let me sleep if we go to hell.
Blame my mouth if the house is burning,
Check my tongue if you still can't tell.

The sweat descends,
My psyche bends,
I'll never be
The same again.
The soul is twisted
But the skin will mend.
My tight young skin
Covers up a sick palimpsest.

Make your mark on a darkened dance floor.
Slip across the present tense,
Press up against the skin you care for,
Meet me where the sweat descends.