The Cremation of Care
Verse 1
I had the key to a kingdom I never once saw:
a name on a list and a seat in the hall.
My father said "redwoods" one time, and no more,
so I built the rest of it out behind that door —
the oil-painted fathers, the mahogany frame.
I was the heir. I just had to keep the name.
Chorus
There's a ghost in the gentlemen's club:
he holds the glass, he shares the blood,
he wears my old name and a tailored suit,
he guards the kingdom, he keeps the truth.
And the mahogany walls and the heavy oak doors
couldn't hold back what the fire restores.
Verse 2
I was petitioning a lodge the same year that I changed.
I got as far as a dinner. I got as far as a lane —
rented shoes and their gravy and men being kind,
and the mystery I'd read in a friend's book, left behind.
Their rule is you have to be a man to walk in.
You can turn after. You just can't turn and begin.
Chorus
There's a ghost in the gentlemen's club:
he holds the glass, he shares the blood,
he wears my old name and a tailored suit,
he guards the kingdom, he keeps the truth.
He's the one body that ever burned down,
and nobody up there has noticed he's gone.
Bridge
Up north every July they go in through the trees.
I get it secondhand. I get it in pieces:
they ferry a body they built out of cloth
and burn it in front of an owl dressed in moss —
forty feet hollow, a speaker, a wire,
a voice on a tape playing God to the choir.
And down in the lodge room a man plays a corpse
in an apron he borrowed, and rises, of course,
and goes home the same, with a word and a ring.
Two rooms full of men who rehearse the whole thing.
Outro
Nobody handed me an effigy. There wasn't a script.
I was the room and the fire and the man in the crypt.
I never once saw what I gave up. I gave it up blind,
and that's how you know it was a price and not a line.
I can still go in daylight, a guest and no more,
walk in through the redwoods and out the same door,
and stand at the owl — all that concrete, all that moss —
and be gone before dark, every time, at a loss.
I can stand at the shrine. I will never see it lit.
They cremate care up there and they keep the world.
I kept the care. I gave up the world.
I walked into the fire.
I walked out alive.
I left him at the door.
That was the cremation of care.