What the Fever Drew (Egon Schiele)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You drew
your own body
the way a butcher
draws a diagram —
every tendon
on display,
every joint
bent past
the angle
a polite century
was willing
to look at —
and the drawings
smelled faintly
of dried tangerine peel
and turpentine
and the particular
orange
of a man
who has decided
the skin
is not
a garment.

[Verse 2]
You were twenty
and your teacher
was the most famous
painter in Vienna
and you walked away
because the teacher
wanted you
to draw
the body
the way the body
looked
from across a room
and you wanted
to draw the body
the way the body
felt
from inside
the somatosensory cortex
at four
in the morning
when the body
has stopped
pretending
it is comfortable.

[Chorus]
They jailed you
for the drawings.
Eighty-nine days
in a cell
in Neulengbach
for drawing
the thing
the body does
when it stops
performing
for the room
and the judge
burned
one of the drawings
in the courtroom
with a candle
and the drawing
curled
the way skin curls
when it is
done
being looked at.

[Verse 3]
The flu
took you
at twenty-eight
in nineteen eighteen —
three days
after it took
your pregnant wife —
and the studio
still had
wet paint
on the canvas
you were finishing
and the wet paint
had the sticky
amber weight
of a sentence
the mouth
has not
finished saying
and the mouth
will not
finish saying it
and the sentence
is still
wet.

[Outro]
Every art student
alive tonight
who draws
the body
the way
the body
feels
from inside
instead of
the way
the body
looks
from across
the room
is standing
in the corridor
you built
out of
turpentine
and nerve endings
and twenty-eight years
that were
exactly enough.

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