Arthur S/Arthur S & The Effects

Oh April,

I’m still sitting in this break room, in the mechanical shadow of generations of hard earned days, clinging to these words on the pages before they can send me out again and it all gets washed away. Time is at my throttle, got her teeth clenched into the gears of my knees, breathing down my neck in the hot August sun and if I crash I know she’ll just keep going and going and going and going… The sun is peeking through the windows to laughs at this terrible burden of destiny cause it knows it will always be found. Its got me workin’ those levers for that movement that I need, grabbin’ that throttle for the strength to believe, lookin’ for that love somewhere beneath my feet.

This came to me all today as I was running across town trying to finish that last run on City Route 8, all in a vividly wild open mouthed July dream. I had to scribble this down before I lost it. Had to let you know why I’m scared to love you, had to let you know what I feel upon those starry nights we share that disappear too soon into that blackness below.

This is The Ballad of The Queen City Stomper.

You know I was a good kid here. Back when houses sprouted like the winter wheat green against the dream of a wide open sky. I had all the good grades, went to all the good meetings. In the grocery store they would smile at me big and then walk right by. But there was a trouble I couldn’t shake that came runnin up on my street fresh off the TV and right into their lost hands. Out the glow of the windows into this cultural wasteland with a bone to pick, a shoe to fit, and a shrug of ‘"always been like that boy, not much you can do.” There’s a fear when you call and there’s a fear when the sun falls, and I could feel it creep into me. They were nodding their heads in silence to the beat of a street so empty at night. I couldn’t take it so I’d ride my bike over by our trestles in the tall grass fields, away from all the lies away from what they’d steal. They could count me from the team April, but not that sand beneath my feet. When I found that guitar and I found those notes I started to find myself. They couldn’t touch me or paint me in their fashion anymore, they just had to see me, and I ran with that as fast as I could. I wanted my thoughts to know me and grow in me like the way the grass grows in the cracks in the sidewalk walkin’ towards your door.

But boy oh boy look who is back now? Did the prodigal son return? Take a look at Jesse and I while he bumps his subs or ask the days where we spill our secrets out in faceless games and it’s a resounding no. Tough breaks sent me back home with splinters of the past dug into my heels April, and I’m pushing now so I can let them reveal…

I’d heard the winters up North had a bite to them, but when you’re hangin’ on by a thread you just run. But they chilled those guitar strings and they chilled my heart, April, they killed anything before it could even start. The band could rip but I wasn’t busting through. I was a big fish alright, but that doesn’t do ya much good when you’re a big fish in Alpha Centauri. Try and catch that with your nightcrawler and your dime store bobber, you’d have more luck as a wedding band with the hooks and the looks. Funny how the big plans slipped through my hands but I realized it all down at the beach where I could understand. She was my Wendy, my Chicago Tribune to all that was new but on that drive back she started to move her hands across the dash. I kept measuring the distance between us in the passing streets lights ‘till we hit that bridge out of Hammond and there was nothing left to take a tape to. A silence had come and it was time. Time to lay it all out and see what’s left, whats really left after your love and your dreams are spilled and disappear over the crack in the road. Seven years in one short goodbye and all I could do was turn around and turn away. I was Icarus falling like a curtain through that text on the phone. That barnburner had burnt it all down, too busy hiding poems in lunchboxes crumpled with pbjs and to do lists for another day. Too busy running scared down those county lines never knowing what to say.

Next I was staring in the mirror after a late night gig down at Jakes. Paid out and played out, I’m just standing in that dank bathroom with the door locked, vacant like a taxi, sweating through my primal bones trying not to feel so alone. All I could think of was Riley and I swimming in our arms and something that I’d, something I’d found underneath that cottonwood tree long ago that I needed to find again on my way back home. Where I was born anew long ago under those undying floodlights from the gravel pits, trying to be the heroes we needed to be and not just reeling from something in the evening.

So I drove back home with the windows down, just singing those tunes alone. In the back of my mind came the batting cages, the cabbage fields, those cranes wailing above on an October day with Riley underneath that cottonwood tree with her straight road hair watching me in the outfield waiting for that thing in the air. Strawberries in a muddy field. We never made it to state and I heard shes upstate now but there was a thread of a world there I needed to unravel. It comes welling up every time I deliver to those blocks and on every door I have to knock, saying yes Clark you’ll have to sign for that box cause Mr. I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man and I’m trying to understand what I’ve been dealt in this land.

Sometimes I’m late to your place April cause I circle the blocks again, suspended in the back of the evening like those blown out cottonwood seeds. I’ll hit that Hwy 7 and turn left onto Riverdale in the dusk to pick up the pieces there with the rocks and the gravel and the prairie poppies and the sunflowers growing through the cracks where the water rushes through. April I wanna be your shadow, born anew in the curtain of the night. I’ve got to shake these tears from my shoulders and find the strength to believe, cause they’ve turned the dial on me before and I don’t wanna turn the dial on another century, another year, another hour, another minute, another second…

Are you gonna make it tonight? It’s been raining all day but Frank took a chance on us, heard me singing down at the station. Heard I had some new songs from the deals that all went wrong. Steel and the Shortbeat with The Johnstown Floods, 8pm down at The Armory. I’ll fold up a poster in here for ya with a ticket just in case. Garrett and his Johnstown group can really play so I’m excited to see what my new group The Shortbeats can do with both of us on the same bill.

In peoples kindness life grows, you know that all too well April. Sometimes the kindest thing people can do is to let you sort out your failures on your own terms. I think we all have that movement that we need that we can find when we are worn down and need the strength to believe, but we can lose sight of it when your dreams aren’t what they seem. All I know is I’ve got to keep playing, somehow I’ve got so much to say. I know this world will crack my weary bones and try to leave me behind but I think I’ve found the Mantra. It’s in all the silence on the sidewalks walking from your house, in all the sunflowers growing from the crack in the ground, in the way we hold each others vessels down at the trestles, and in the war I was and the man I’ve found. I know they’ll laugh that this place is my muse and that some days my arms are aching only to be seen, but I can feel the movement start in me with each step beneath my feet.

Sorry for all the scribbles and edits, but I had to give it to ya straight. You know how I always talk about how I’m held together by a thread of a world that I need to know, and I hope this can help ya understand me after I clock out, wash my hands across my face and hope they’ll set me free.

See ya tonight!

The Queen City Stomper