The Earth Probably Has Cancer

from Perfect Sleeping Weather by Larry Fulford

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$1 USD or more
Buy the Full Digital Album
Perfect Sleeping Weather (the book) (signed)
Price includes shipping to anywhere in the US.

Scrawled into notebooks from the familiar comforts of temporary homes and the passenger seats of mechanically unsound vehicles adrift on the highways and back roads of America, Perfect Sleeping Weather is fifteen years of thoughts, observations, facts, and fictions hammered into a collection of poetry that, according to one reader, "sounds like a sigh."

In this, his first book, writer/drummer/comedian Larry Fulford reflects on the usual -- life, death, love and leaving -- while still managing to name-check Van Halen. Twice.

Sold Out

lyrics

because Joey flicks cigarette butts
into our backyard.
Hundreds of filters later,
charred and wet and rotting,
not unlike my guts
after a night of drinking
and listening to old country songs.

I figure we’re due for a cancer tree
or gypsy figures
to sprout out of the ground
and dance around
smoking and smiling
lawn gnomes with a purpose
asking for glasses of Dickel to shoot the shit over
and discarding their own miniature cigarettes
into our backyard.

Shake it off, boys and girls,
walk it off.
Straightaways is on loud
but I can still hear planes
and trees and/or lawn gypsies growing
and coughing up bloody coughs,
blaming them on pollen
and prostitutes.

I sit among flames
next to the devil on his cell phone
making a deal or finalizing a soul
but not mine, not tonight.
Tonight I’m conversation.
Flammable fodder sneaking by
on the back of a nightcrawler.

“Yo, I’ll pay you a dollar to eat that.”
“No.”

And the devil checks his e-mail
and breathes a sigh of relief through a stuffy nose,
coughs a fiery
bloody cough
blames it on pollen.
And I can only smile at him
and offer, “My mom said the pollen count’s
higher than usual this year. We need some rain.”

And he can only pretend I’m right,
that I’m his friend
he can bum lights from
slow dancing with a full moon
and the biggest fool this side of the state line.

That’s not a freckle, son, it’s a growth.
Better do something about it before
they have to shave your mountains off
and drain your oceans.