You're Damaged

The first album that came to mind when we were asked to choose a song that we would defend as poetry was Cerulean Salt.  It is not my favorite album or even in my top five favorite albums of 2013 but the earnest delivery of its lyrics reminded me of many poetry readings I had heard.  Katie Crutchfield the artist at the center of Waxahatchee writes lyrics that are specific which seem to be two things that good poems often are.  The song "You're Damaged" is the albums closing track and is about the difference between adult and child friendships.  

The speaker of the poem is a disenchanted adult who has found life to be less exciting than she had imagined it to be growing up.  The audience of the poem is her friend who the speaker has known since she was eleven and who she has stayed in touch with over the years. The song is taking place when they are together after years of being apart and find that their relationship is not the same as when they were young.  The song depicts the distance between the two friends that developed as they aged and the subsequent unhappiness it caused.  

The poem shows that the two friends were happy and close as children in a stanza in which they run with "sabers and sticks," sabers being the swords they pretended the sticks were, "to [their] peace." The lines show that they always pictured themselves living their lives happily side by side.  But, as the lyrics point out, they were always destined to separately experience "chaos, condolence, [and] defeat."  In the present time, the friends are sad and unable to connect.  The speaker uses the metaphor of herself having a shell to describe the barriers that they put up emotionally.  The lyrics conclude "We’ll cut our hands agape and manifest / Compassion we'll lose with time and test," conveying that through their pain of growing up together they will develop compassion which they ultimately lose as they age further.  The lyrics are effective because they are a collection of short sentences that are self contained ideas that create an abstract story.  The disjointedness of the lyrics gives it the feeling of a memory which connects to the central literary device of flashbacks used in the song.