Words by Chris Otepka (Pictured)
Music by The Heligoats, from album Goodness Gracious

Yesterday I got lost in a heat vent twice,
I know I should have just kept out but it was too damn enticing.
I thought I knew my way back but I must have got turned around
because the vent I entered into no longer vent where I remembered.
Heating ducts do take me to an altered mental state
where one has trouble breathing air, but no trouble feeling great.
To travel inside of a body, travel inside of a vein,
if the home is where the heart is then the attic is the brain.
Like a drain, for the dust, for the pain, for the unwanted items.
Items in your heat vents tend to stay and die for years
until the day their body crumbles and gives you dusty tears.
Filling space you thought so safe, in your room you feel the most.
Are you breathing heated air or are you breathing heated ghosts?
Oh no.

Now I see it’s softer than an ice cube and it’s sticking to your tongue.
Static starts to build and fingertips are stung.
It’s like I can taste electrons now, just the slightest hint.
I’m still the only one I know, it seems, who dreams of being lint.
Well, now I’m lint. I am no one that important.
I’ll just collect myself in the corner, be some sort of tangible form of boredom,
sampled, trampled, and never very far from where you are standing.

I’ll be collected and killed off like skin cells and runoff
and sneezes and secrets and clues and insects and refuse
and bleeding and breathing and heating
and keeping the secrets bottled then fleeing.
Sparking, exploding, head first in black holes,
digging and digging and deeper and faster
and farther than anything that ever lasted
and all that I hear is the devil laughing. And it keeps me together,
it keeps me from blacking out, whiting out,
I always know that he’s always right and he’s always right and he’s always here
and he’s with me tonight.
And although he’s losing, hooked up to tubing,
I hear his voice through it and it sounds like dust,
when he musters up,
“I love you.”

[The Heligoats on Daytrotter]

[The Heligoats]

[Buy Goodness Gracious here]

–Sean