Dear Astronaut
Band/artist history
The Lonely Nights are staring in the mirror, not recognizing the person staring back. The Lonely Nights are looking up at a starless sky on a bitter winter night debating the finer points of existance. The Lonely Nights are clumsily strumming inherited guitars or scribbling bad angst poems on napkins. The Lonely Nights cannot define irony, but know it and appreciate it when they see it.
In every sustained note there is a nation of insomniac bastard children quoting Leonard Cohen poems and wearing black zip-up hooded sweatshirts. The blue smoke of their cigarettes fills the room hanging thick in the air and invading nostrils. They have their carcinogenic candy to chew on but their yellow fingers cannot get a grasp on anything else. On the other side of the window their brothers and sisters are all lost in the clouds.
It's been forever since I've slept right or watched the sun paint pink the corners of the sky. The moon has been a more steady companion although not much of a conversationalist. The floor is littered with notebooks and knocked-over ashtrays, half-written letters and dictionaries and bibles. A copy of Johnny Cash's Man in Black and three or four books by Lenin. I can see a BRIGHT GLOWING NEON CROSS through my window and if I could I'd follow it like the north star right to my personal messiah, or at least out of this place for a while. All the strings on my guitar are broken so a jar of whisky will have to do. This is the only way.
Hiding in the closet is a shoe box full of long-lost memories and photographs and ink-stained papers 10 1/2 x 8 college ruled. Flashbacks to cars with engines running, first kisses, apartments that reek of cat shit. Desolate city streets and disappearing streetlamps. TV sets on rooftops and pretty black-haired girls shining with blue-grey eyes.
Next to that is a box of regrets and realizations and its contents could fill the ocean, displacing enough water to drown us all. There are empty bottles and amputated limbs. Lost friendships and aging families. White picket fences. Fathers that deserve an apology for the demeaning lyrics sung too loud over some sloppy chord progression or another.
But GODDAMMIT! it's black as the end times here when you shut all the doors and the windows and the lights--and outside it's white like Antarctica, as white as this paper or the evasive glow of heaven and even the sky is white and it'll chill you to the bones and you can hardly see the moon, let alone your path in front of you.
So we must light our hearts on fire and let that light shine strong to guide us through the blizzard because there are no brake lights to follow or discernable monuments to mark the way and dawn is growing near.Admin
Jeb
@jebreject
