In 2007, I played banjitar for a punk-rock Irish band in Austin.  They were in the style and spirit of The Pogues, Flogging Molly, bands like that.  I wasn't right for them, but we played a couple shows.  The banjitar is a banjo with a guitar neck, or a guitar with a banjo body.  It allows guitar players to add a banjo sound to the mix w/o having to know how to play the banjo.  It was fun.  I like the sideman role.  It's relaxing to just stand off to the side and play the songs without having to engage the room.  We were friends, the band and me, but I wasn't really what they were looking for.  Bands are fickle.  They're either perfect, or totally wrong.  There isn't a lot of middle ground.  But it was fun.

One day during rehearsal at the guy's house in downtown Austin, we took a break and walked out to the front yard.  About half a block away, we observed a homeless person wandering in a psychotic daze.  He was black, but had white, powdered skin, as though striving to achieve as pale a complexion as possible, indicating that he did not have to work outside, and was thus a personage of high status.

Like this:

He failed in his attempt at cosmetic subterfuge, and not only did he clearly work outside, it was obvious that he also lived there.  We stood out on the front lawn smoking cigarettes and watching him scouring the drug clouds for a fix, when suddenly he noticed us.  Like a zombie who catches the scent of the living, the dry, powder-skinned Moor saw some white punk-rocker types with an Irish drinking vibe, and figured we might be able to guide him like Virgil in The Iliad, or The Divine Sitcom, or whatever it is, leading Dante through the 9 circles of the underworld, in search of malt liquor and drugs.  He zeroed in on us, like a vulture on a drunken Irish corpse.  It was a bummer.  Nobody was in the mood for it.

The singer sighed.  He dragged his cigarette and resigned himself to the tiresome encounter.  There was no way to avoid it.  "This is going to suck," he said.  It was hilarious.  The Zombie Moor approached.  The singer deflected him, and we went back inside to continue the rehearsal. 

I might have given him a quarter.  I don't remember.  I tend to help homeless people, but this time, I may have skipped it.

I don't remember.

Afterwards, I couldn't shake the hilarious image of The Zombie Moor sighting us through the vapor of his own subjective drug trip.  The way the singer said, "This is going to suck" was hilarious.  I couldn't get it out of my head.

So I wrote a song about it.  

Well, not really about it.  But I used The Zombie Moor as inspiration for the title, and the lyrics at the end of the song.  It was he of the homeless, powdered skin I imagined pleading with the sky for clemency and drugs.  "Please have mercy, psychotic sky; please don't hurt me," he would cry.  To him, it was the sky who was crazy, not he.  The sky, of course, would need to be a "who."

Not a he.  Or a that.  Or a what.

But a who.

Please have mercy, O lunatic atmosphere. 

I plead with ye.

Don't hurt me.

Psychotic Sky (please don't hurt me)

Another sunny day
makes me wanna scream
I'm walking on foodstamps
living on a dream
strung out
on this livestreaming video feed
called life

I bought a lotto ticket
as penance for my sins
if life is a game
how come no one ever wins?
Don't spin
that bottle at me, baby,
I won't be anybody's wife

I sleep until 5 o'clock
every afternoon
I'll do my hair
until I meet my doom
I wear those invisible pearls
you gave me
almost every day

     My brain is broken
     and my heart is stoned
     I thought I was jokin'
     I thought I was alone

The women are wearing rattlesnakes
and the walls are wearing wires
is this love,
or just another one of my inadequate desires?
We'll drink that champagne someday,
baby,
surrounded by the fires
of hell

Girls are made of spice
and I'm made of Soylent Green
everything you say is nice
everything I say is poignant and mean
so kiss my ass,
get a job,
and give me all your money
when you die

I'm flyin' like an eagle,
baby,
in my prison cell
you say tomato,
I say go to hell
all those lovin' words
falling from your lips
like time-release lies

     My brain is broken
     and my heart is stoned
     I thought I was jokin'
     I thought I was alone

All this optimism
makes me kinda sick
suicide or existentialism
take your pick
this anachronistic schtick
will maybe pay off
after we get rich

Is that a halo,
or a cloud of gnats?
I ain't ready for no close-up
but I'm ready for the rats
that's me,
blowin' high-powered metaphors
out of my nose

I'm the dirtiest, most
courteous
manual-lever meat
if you're ever running in a
schizophrenic fury down the street
here's a song I learned
just forya,
repeat it after me,
this is how it goes:

     Psychotic sky
     please have mercy
     psychotic sky
     please don't hurt me
     please don't hurt me
     psychotic sky

©2008 Nathan Payne