Father John Misty Describes the End of the World

I remember swelling the cymbals,
watching people get more & more agitated by
the spirit. The chapel was filling up with young
Hollywood hipsters speaking in tongues. Baptism
by fire, God was going to fall on America.

When the day came, I was a kid, like fourteen,
swooning through bangers & ghouls, abusing
GarageBand for fame & profit, playing a party
with no one paying attention, Neil Young acolytes
in ponchos & heavy sweaters drinking tequila

& puking hearts of gold, because this is the way we
wanted it to be. No, when the day came, I was twenty-two,
some kind of blueblood, a leaky rowboat, how unhappy
I was at drowning. I was beat down, walking up &
down Bourbon Street looking for the best rock stars

of my generation, but all I was able to find was a skeleton
pissing into a dumpster fire, Mother Earth wearing Beats
by Dre & trying to drown out the pain. It was kind of poetic
& I found myself thinking, I didn’t used to cry so much.
I’m despicable as a result, I get it. I should just be by myself,

writing a novel because it’s never been done before. No, when 
the day comes, I’m thirtysomething, hanging out in the smoldering
dust of Coachella & playing twelve-dimensional chess with a 
grieving ventriloquist whose dummy just died. He keeps repeating
the same thing over & over again: “My God, these children.” While

I’m thinking about that, the ventriloquist kills my queen. There’s
blood on his hands. Oh, my country, my country! I always thought
that it was going to look way more sophisticated than this when
evil happened, but here I am anyway, killing time before a meteor
hits this place & our limbs become untrue & we sink like trees

or unsaid words in dictionary mud.

Inspired by Nick Paumgarten’s profile of Father John Misty in the June 26, 2017 issue of The New Yorker

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