To Damien Rice

Your voice is like sandpaper
on my soul - I never pretend
to understand music, but my god,
you have to stop tearing me apart
like that, watching my secrets and
fears as if I were an open book - I'm not.

I never listen to you sing until the right moment arises.

Right now, last shadows of golden sun falling
against college lawns and library glass,
work piling up on my table and my soul
refusing to sit, only fly and flutter, hold on
so tight to the past and the future and the
trembling present - your voice is the last touch
I want to stir the storm in my mind, your voice
caresses the chaos in me and reminds me that
life is so beautiful and so fragile, a shard of glass
in an ocean, a single blooming bruise on a painting.

You have settled on my skin like dust,
and I have to scrape you off like peeling paint
when I take off the headphones, ease you out
of the recesses and ravines of my mind.
It's been years, and you're a guilty pleasure.

Do you live your life like art? Are you an
asshole in a relationship? - I'm sure you are.
Are you kind to strangers? Do you sing to
yourself on rainy mornings, strumming on
an old guitar, watching the sun fighting fog?

Your voice is like a mountain coloured dawn.
Like bitter alcohol in a coffee mug, like a dying
memory, like a frozen ocean making waves.
"I'm going to be dead soon", you said to the
interviewer, "And I want to kind of grow up
before I die." What nonsense, Damien, you're
always going to be old and young, wise and
unbelievably foolish, raw and burnt out, burning.

When you give the world a fragment of yourself,
you give the world a piece of time. You might change
and you might live a real life, walking to get coffee in
the morning and waiting for a phone call, forgetting your
towel out of the shower and falling asleep to the sound of
midnight - but you will never do these things in my life,
in my life you will live your life like art, intense and full
of passion, you will live your life like heartbreak, every word
you say will sound like smoke and wildflowers, every note
on your guitar will be an open door, a bone of truth.

Thank you for letting me have you
in the way that only I can have you.
Thank you for letting me listen.
Your music isn't your music after it plays
in my ears - your music forms shadowy
pieces of my fragmented life, angry at the
world and yet broken by its beauty.