sharp knife: an autobiography in four parts

time tick tick ticks after me / my mp3 is out of juice / i wrote a song for you but what's the use / how did we get knocked so loose, knocked so loose?


and for some reason i can write pages and pages of thoughts, fluid and flowing out of my fingers and into the keys; useless words that i can't turn in for a grade, words that won't add up to twelve annotated pages about things i could care less about. but when it comes to matters of the mind, matters of the heart, there's no limit, there's no word count, there's no stopping me; i'm rolling down a hill with too much memento and it won't stop until the crash at the end, when i'm out of breath, lying on the ground with pieces of grass in my hair, looking up to survey the damage. it's the calm not before the storm but after, the deep breath after i can finally rest my hands and read the feverish words that crawl across the page.


well nature has its own rules / like gravity crushing me / lately it's a little hard for me to see / lately it's a little hard for me to believe / and we should all just go along / and it all would be so easy / if we could just say, "let it be" / but that's not me


you think you know yourself and then the world knocks you down and laughs in your face; sometimes it's a chuckle, a giggle, an inside joke where for once you're not on the outside. and then without warning you're knocked into the outside, knocked down to the ground and everything you thought you knew is completely different. seeing things from the other side, "waist high in the world." the only thing that's comforting is that you don't have to wonder anymore who will be there when it's all said and done, because you've been there, done that, gotten the t-shirt. once you know, it's a lot easier to deal. it's a lot easier to love the ones who care and forget about the ones that don't. and even though there are times when it feels like all you're doing is kicking and screaming, you're kicking the world in the face and screaming that hey, i'm still here. i'm still here.


and i think there's a reason / at least there's a sign / and all that we call chaos / i will say it's by design


all my life i always felt like i never really had a way with words. whenever i speak i talk like i'm tripping, clumsy feet falling over sentences and phrases and hey, it's hard to always get it right. but give me a pen, give me the keys, and i'll give you something someone can understand, someone can feel, someone can love. people have told me i've moved them, i've made them cry, i'm amazing - all these things i never really thought anyone would believe about me, much less i myself. i guess somewhere between all those words i found a way to make people love me. somewhere between the fourth grade stories and the middle school journals and the high school poems and the college ramblings i found a way to love myself too.


so new friend can you hear this? / can we return to fearless? / merry pranksters one and all / and walk that devil down the hall


in the end i'm never really sure what i've wanted to say. in the end i'm still making it up as i go along. in the end i read over everything i've said and laugh at myself because who really knows what they're talking about, anyways? but what i do know is that i have life, i have love, and i have words to call my own. no one can take my words away from me. and i've been writing for years and i'm writing now and i'll keep writing even after this is all a distant memory. and when it's all behind me, when we can dance again and run again and jump fences again and do everything we always loved to do - i'll come and write it down. because that's who i am, that's what i do, and i'm still here to do it. i'm not afraid anymore.