Dalsey, Hillblom, Lynn

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a propeller plane, a manifest being stamped)
Say it out loud. D. H. L.
You just said three surnames.

[Verse 1]
Nineteen sixty-nine, San Francisco to Honolulu,
three men with an idea so simple it was nearly nothing:
fly the shipping documents ahead of the actual ship,
so the paperwork clears customs while the cargo's still at sea.
Adrian Dalsey. Larry Hillblom. Robert Lynn.
That's it. That's the whole name. That's all it's ever been.

[Chorus]
D-H-L! You say it every day!
It's on a van outside your house, it's on a warehouse, it's on a plane!
Three men's surnames, worn down to three letters,
said a hundred million times a day by nobody who knows!
Dalsey, Hillblom, Lynn. Say the whole thing once.
It won't take any longer. It's the same three sounds.

[Verse 2]
And Hillblom, of the three, had the strangest life by far —
he made his fortune, moved out to the Northern Marianas,
flew his own small plane, and in nineteen ninety-five
that plane went into the ocean and they never found the body.
What followed was a paternity case that ran for years
across the Pacific. You could write a film about it. Nobody has.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There is a particular kind of oblivion in an acronym.
It isn't that they're forgotten — forgetting takes a memory first.
It's that the name is in continuous use, worldwide, hourly,
and the use itself is what wore the person off it.
Not erased by neglect. Erased by repetition.
Said so often that the saying rubbed the man away.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the plane, receding)
Dalsey. Hillblom. Lynn.
Three men. One shrug of an abbreviation.