The Clothes That Were Not His (Edgar Allan Poe)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You married your cousin when she was thirteen
and you loved her without apology
in a century that let you
and a poverty that didn't care
Virginia played piano in the parlor
of whichever house you hadn't been evicted from yet
and coughed blood onto the keys
and you wrote about women dying
in every story you published
because the one dying in your parlor
was the only plot
you couldn't revise

[Verse 2]
You invented the detective —
Dupin, sitting in a shuttered room in Paris,
solving crimes by thinking
about how other people think,
which is the prefrontal cortex
modelling the prefrontal cortex
and you did it first, you did it before anyone
had a word for the genre
you were building
You invented horror that doesn't need a monster —
just a man, a room,
a wall being bricked shut
while the narrator explains
in perfectly reasonable sentences
why this is all perfectly reasonable

[Chorus]
You drank because the world was wrong
and the drinking made you wrong too
but the wrongness was specific:
you could write a whole cosmological treatise
sober and a vicious book review drunk
and both of them would be
the most precise thing anyone published that year
The pen was not your salvation —
the pen was the other addiction,
the one that produced pages
instead of mornings you couldn't remember
You rewrote "The Raven" forty times
because despair has a meter
and you refused to get it wrong

[Verse 3]
Virginia died in the cottage in the Bronx
on a straw mattress
under every coat you owned
because there was no firewood
and you carried her afterward
the way a building carries a crack:
structurally, invisibly,
in the part of the wall
you can't see from the street
but which determines
whether the whole thing stands or doesn't
After she died the writing got worse
and the drinking got worse
and the vicious book reviews got better
which tells you everything
about which organ
the grief sharpened

[Bridge]
They found you in Baltimore
in clothes that were not yours —
a cheap suit, a straw hat,
someone else's shoes —
delirious, calling a name
nobody could identify
which might have been a person
or a character
or the word for a color
that only exists
when the fever gets high enough
to invent one
No one has ever explained
how you got there
or whose clothes those were
or what the last four days contained
and the mystery you invented as a genre
took its inventor
and refused to solve him

[Outro]
You died at forty
in a hospital called Washington College
which was not a college
and the death certificate said congestion of the brain
which was not a diagnosis
and they buried you in a grave
so poorly marked
that it took twenty-six years
for anyone to build a proper monument
which tells you everything
about the distance between
what a country reads
and what it pays for
The drawer where they keep your name
holds every locked room,
every buried-alive narrator,
every detective who sits in the dark
and thinks about thinking —
the genre you invented
is the drawer,
and it has never stopped producing stories
about people who cannot get out