Florence Nightingale - Henry Jamison

Well, I went in for some medicine

Feelin' like a wounded soldier, deathly pale and a woman did come to my bedside

A regular Florence Nightingale

But my girlfriend just wasn’t having the comparison

So I back-pedaled, said «okay then, how bout Mary Magdalene?»

Anyway, I was reminded of a dream I had as my confidence came and went

Where all the girls from the 90's

Were singing «Just Around the Riverbend"all along the banks of the Arkansas

And I paddled through in a dugout canoe

I was a John Smith cartoon, with a strong jaw

Listen I’m white, middle-class and male and the dream does tell a tale

Of Whiteness dreaming of Whiteness

With a want for wisdom that might tip the scale cuz my friend and I felt an

affinity

With the tribes in the documentary

That plays on a loop in the backmost wing of the Museum of Natural History

But my imperialist didn’t suddenly die he just loosened his tie and took a knee

and Disneyland never made a man

That’s all just false idolatry that’s all just false I-

Florence Nightingale

Comes in with a lamp, they say

On stormy nights when the wound’s remembering

Talks to me about that photograph

Me and my brother on the sidewalk

Holding squirt guns and squinting in the sun,

That was the summer I was nine

Well it’s a sunny day

At Sugar Sugar High School

And the quarterback and track star are cuttin' class and shootin' pool well

this is not to say that they should be in class

Still why they have to be such assholes?

It’s as if we men just want to be

Picked up sequentially

And held to the breast of a giantess who stands ten miles out at sea

Or, alternatively, we could find success

You know really be the best then maybe we could rest upon our father’s knee

Florence Nightingale

Comes in with a lamp, they say

On stormy nights when the wound’s remembering

Talks to me about that photograph

Me and my brother on the sidewalk

Holding squirt guns and squinting in the sun, that was the summer I was nine

Mary Magdalene

Was at Golgotha, they say

She saw the water separate from the blood and I look at that painting

Of him hanging so peacefully with Mary by his bleeding side that was the summer

he was 33