To The Boneyard

Respite in twilight, space in the cavity wall
At grandparents' house behind the apple tree
Where once you sang with your siblings
Now watching bodies bobbing down the stream leaving the town

I'm a picture of no flesh only bones
As we're stripping off my skin to run it up the pole
And salute the breeze that ripples the sheath
Of the skeleton that's trembling on the ground beneath

Walked your entire country up the central reservation
Take me to the boneyard baby, take me to the boneyard baby
The deadest stare, the slackest hair, the saddest conservation
Take me to the boneyard baby, take me to the boneyard baby

We rifle through piles of bones
For something to chew on, for something to own

Through my teenage years at my mother's house,
Every evening 6 times there comes a phone call to ask
"Where's my daughter gone?" She moved 6 years ago
Now receiver's cold, the phonecalls dry, there's no one home
And that is what we feared the most

And so we stitch our eyes and mouths closed lest we open them,
Breaking the seal that our bodies have formed
As a natural defence just to hold back the sorrow
That friends made today will be deaths mourned tomorrow