Lyrics

Potemkin Villages

In a Potemkin Village
at the dawn of day for night,
filled with human phantoms
in the grayscale rainbow light.
Living on a trap street
in a paper town,
there’s a false messiah
who wears a tinsel crown.

From Argleton to Agloe,
Cockaigne to Erewhon,
Goblu to Beatosu
and Lake Wobegon.
In our desolate utopia
we still have time to wait
for an empty cornucopia.
It’s getting early late.

Lillian Virginia Mountweazel
and her mailbox photographs
was a nihilartikel,
inserted just for laughs.
The ghost words in the glossary.
The copyrighters trap.
The nonexistent islands
on the Zeno map.

Pinocchio’s Podesta
and Peary’s Crocker Land
were only phantom islands,
lost when they began.
The petrophagic stone louse
devoured the Berlin Wall.
Fake news isn’t new.
False Islands are true.

An ellipsis in our history
jump cutting through
the lost 11 days
of 1752.
Julius and Gregory
oblige us to remember
that the date of Red October
was the 7th of November.

A countable infinity
is less than aleph-one.
The mortal and divinity,
the Father and the Son.
Time is the commodity.
Unreal estate is space.
Reality’s an oddity
and nothing’s commonplace.