Joanna Newsom Lyrics
"Inflammatory Writ"

Oh, where is your inflammatory writ?
Your text that would incite a light,
"Be lit"?
Our music deserving devotion unswerving -
cry "Do I deserve her?" with unflagging fervor.
(Well, no we do not, if we cannot get over it)

But what's it mean when suddenly we're spent?
Tell me true
Ambition came and reared its head, and went
Far from you
Even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden
but you dirge for the dead, n'take no jam on your bread
- just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed.

And all at once it came to me,
and i wrote and hunched 'till four-thirteen
But that vestal light, it burns out with the night
in spite of all the time that we spent on it:
one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet!
While outside, the wild boars root
without bending a bough underfoot-
O it breaks my heart; I don't know how they do't.

And as for my inflammatory writ?
Well, I write it an I was not inflamed one bit.
Advice from the master derailed that disaster;
said "Hand that pen over to ME, poetaster!"
While across the great plains, keen and lovely and awful,
ululate the last Great American Novels -
An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit.
(But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit.)