My Time Outside the Womb - Titus Andronicus

The first thing you see is the light

Then you focus on a man in a mask with a knife

As he cuts you away from everything you thought you knew about life

Now you’re in your mother’s arms, wrinkled and wet

You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to hard to forget

That you met the world naked and screaming

And that’s how you’ll leave it

In Riverside Hospital, on a July morning

With a push and a pull, this is how I found out

I wasn’t quite so invulnerable

It put the fear of God in me when I heard my daddy say

«one mistake is all that it takes.»

I ended up at Central School, 1993

And met a certain kid named Sarim at the library

He said, «they're ain’t nothing about this place that’s elementary.»

I learned to play the guitar in the seventh grade

In order to convince everyone I was a renegade

That’s when I learned, in Glen Rock

Everybody calls a spade a spade

I couldn’t fool anyone

I couldn’t even fool myself

I was just another book on the shelf, nothing else