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Henry Rollins Spoken Word

Henry Rollins Spoken Word

Quotes / / Poetry / / Spoken Word / / Song Lyrics

Solipsist

For a while today, I hated you. I hated you for being so beautiful and real. I hated you for waking up at night to find your arms around me. I hated your honesty and the way you make people relax when you are around them. I hated you for loving me unconditionally. You have called me on years of cheap emotion and cruelty that came from my fears. When you look at me and smile I no longer feel scared or feel the need to run out of the room gasping for air. You don't make me feel like life is a waste of time and that all you get is cold sweating, dark moments in small rooms all over the world, spending time with other desperate characters who are tearing the path across the night skies of desolation.

Could you believe that I didn't know what to do with your slow, warm affection? Could you believe I was scared by your endless giving giving giving? It took me a while to be able to feel welcomed by your strength that never shows off, never brags, but just nourishes and makes time stop. The feeling of hatred passed in the time it takes for an eye to twitch, and I realized that I have to take care of myself because I belong to someone. Someone is thinking of me right now. I never doubt it. I know you will always be there. Yeah, I'm in my room somewhere. It's freezing outside and I am exhausted. Too many things to do. Too many people to answer to all the time. From here I think of you. My body is wracked in pain and I am burning with fever.

A lot of men want a woman to mother them. They get with a woman and all they do is regress to the point where you might think he might not be capable to take care of himself at all. I don't want another mother. I want a woman. I want to rise to the occasion. I want to learn and bask in your glow. I want to protect you and do whatever I can to give you strength. There is no twist to this. I am not about to blow my brains out. You have not cut me up like others have. It's just this. I want to love you with everything in me. I need your help because I don't know anything about it. I am suspicious and ready to leave and hit the cold road for the frozen dawn. I am just going to trust you with everything in me. I see now that it's the only reason to be here. After kissing you, I cannot remember what it was like to kiss any other woman. At this point I am not sure if I ever have.

High Adventures in the Great Outdoors

I just got off work. I work at an ice cream store. I scoop ice cream into cups, cones, pint containers, quart containers, coffins and body bags. I work behind a counter. I'm kind of like a bartender. I watch the pretty girls pass the window that looks out onto the sidewalk. I'm the guy in the ice cream store. I have been in here eleven hours. My legs ache. I just got off work, it's 2:30a.m. I'm hungry so I go to the only place that's open. 7-Eleven. I get the same thing every night. I sit alone on the curb and eat. I have to walk to my apartment. My apartment is home. I don't want to go home. Home is dark, home is lonely. Home is cold storage. I'd rather go almost anywhere except home. I just got off work. I signed on for extra hours at the ice cream store so I could have somewhere to go. I go back into the 7-Eleven to get a Coke for the walk to the apartment. It's a long walk. I don't want to go to the apartment. The apartment knows I'm coming. The apartment knows I have nowhere else to go. The apartment is smiling. It shuts off the heat and waits for me to fall in. I leave the 7-Eleven and walk down Wisconsin Avenue. I walk past the ice cream store and check the door to make sure it's locked. I just got off work. I hate my life. I hate myself. I feel ugly, unwanted, mad, mean, cold, and condemned. I make the walk to the apartment. I pull out my folding shovel and dig down six feet to my front door.

Pissing in the Gene Pool

I go out on the street. I hear the cars and the people, but that's not what I want. I want to hear jungle music. It's all lies out there. I think I understand the difference between dirt and filth. The dirt is clean and the filth is filthy and it's everywhere. It rips at my eyes. I can keep a better grip than a lot of people I know. And when I make an effort, I can maintain out there.But sometimes I get pushed and my brain goes into automatic pilot and I feel like kicking and walking a straight line right into their diamond minds. But you know you can't do that. You will never touch their minds. That would be like punching at thin air. If you're going to get all the way into it, you might as well take that straight line right into their flesh. You know what I'm talking about. With a smile on your face speak the international language: dirt and filth.

It hurts to let go.Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted.It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't come back. You're left so alone that you can't explain. Damn, there's nothing like that, is there? I've been there and you have too. You're nodding your head.

Art to Choke Hearts

Have you ever got the feeling that there's no time left? Or maybe that it's running out faster than you think, faster than you could possibly imagine? Do you ever get to feeling like that when you're lying in your lover's arms talking a bunch of shit that seems to make sense at the time but not really because you know that tommorow you're not going to feel that way? And you know it all the while and still you go along with it for some reason and you don't know what that reason is but you never stop to question it because you're too wrapped up in some shit that's making you blind?
Do you ever get to feeling like that when someone is stringing you along to your death by wasting your time with bullshit and lies that feel good? Do you ever get that feeling? Do you? Ever at all? Do you think that you'll be here forever? Do you ever think that wasting time is losing time? Do you ever think that losing time is gaining your death? Not death that doesn't touch you, like in a movie or in a magazine or some fucking cause that you give your filthy money to, but your death. The real death, the one that takes your life. Do you ever feel like there's no air to breath? Like things are getting tight and heavy in your chest? Do you ever get that feeling in your guts like it's going to be over sooner than later and sooner as every hour passes, as every minute, as every second goes by? Do you ever feel like the air is being sucked out of you? Do you ever feel like running until you burst into flames and explode?
I do. I've got a stopwatch strapped to my brain. Got a death-trip man screaming in my ear. I got a part animal part machine vision digging its spurs into my side screaming, "Faster, you idiot, the sun is coming up!"