COMA is a side project from Tommy Gardner and Johnny Gardner, who both are members of the Los Angeles based band Machines of agony.
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Slide me through a doorway made of steel that’s elastic,
half the sky is paper, half is glass.
My hands are small revolutions, turning slow,
I wake in other people’s mornings and forget my name.
There’s a pulse beneath the floorboards, like a far-off tide,
and I’m learning how to breathe in another kind of dark.
[Chorus]
I cross the afterlight, I’m shedding like a dream,
the skin of who I was peels down the hallway sterile, clean.
I taste the new like metal, and the old like rust,
I keep on walking forward but my feet distrust.
This is a slow surrender, a salvage and a theft,
you learn to live with loss like something left.
[Verse 2]
We trade our names for numbers, trade our beds for roads,
the map unfolds and paper-cuts my throat.
There’s a magnified horizon where the light misbehaves,
I fold myself into the silence, into these small caves.
A mirror full of strangers mouths the same regret,
their shadows merge with mine and teach me how to forget.
[Chorus 2]
I cross the afterlight, slipping through the seam,
my throat fills up with static and a crooked kind of dream.
I leave a packing of soft things, a suitcase of the past, the zipper snaps
the future moves so fast. It's not a clean erasure, it’s a patient,
crude repair, we sew our edges into the open air.
[Bridge]
There’s a hospital for grief beneath the highway bridge,
they stitch you up in neon, hand you paper knives.
I count the way the ceiling bends like soft permission,
I learn to sing in keys I never owned. Shout it
the old skin bursts and I keep walking, cry it
the silence folds and I keep talking. Breathe it t
he afterlight consumes the night, break it
the afterlight becomes my light.
[Outro:]
The afterlight lingers on my skin like a quiet vow,
the old doors close behind me and I don’t know how
but my palms remember wings.
