Remember by Steve Grogan

I want you to do me a favor.
I want you to promise me you’re going to remember something,
and you gotta promise me you’ll never forget
or else I’ll be coming back after hours to kill you...but listen up.
You have to remember this now and forever.
Recall this until your dying day...

I want you to remember when you’re 23
and you’re driving around with midnight crawling through your skin.
The music is too loud,
and the bass beats your ear drums to death.
The wind is whipping through your hair.
Every light digs its claws in,
gnawing away at the oncoming night.

You’re slipstreaming through glorious city streets
where cats growl and angels piss.
You are finally creative,
suddenly terribly here together alone and distant
all in one compact echo of one crazy cracked moment.
You are finally young beautiful alive.

Every face grows on you
because you’ve seen them somewhere before,
but you’re not sure where.
You’re trying like crazy to put your finger on it,
but the buzz going through your head makes you forget.
You’re driving yourself into the embrace of this familiar.

You are sinking,
slipping like gods fast and hard
into the skin-crawl of this grotesque phantom night,
this bludgeoned aftershock
that lingers in your memory
like an electric spark dwelling on your retina.

I want you to remember the rhythm
and the motion of the dance floor blues.
You’ve got to promise that you’ll remember all of this,
the elation and immortality of youth.
You’ve got to promise you’ll never forget
because, once you do, you might as well be
crying in your coffin already.

Promise me promise me PROMISE ME you won’t forget
because so many other have lost the joy of life.
We have fallen into the Age of Gloom
and there seems to be no way out.
You’ve got to promise you won’t forget
because SOMEONE has to remember.

The fight has to take place
with all of us on common ground.
The battlefield is our minds
and the strategy is to remember
life is a gift,
love is a gift.
It’s all yours to possess.
The world is your treasure.

If life isn’t satisfying, it’s only because you’re too weak.
The strong know how to make their own happiness,
but we are all so very frail these days,
so docile we can hardly even stand.

You’ve got to promise me you’ll be strong.
You gotta hold that memory close to your heart like poker cards.
We have to recover from this never-ending night
to crash cars in the glorious blaze of the sun,
to see a wisdom of our own invention come to life,
to see love rip across the continent like a nuclear explosion,
to see the stars deny us nothing,
to see it all come circling back to that one fleeting moment...

when you are in the car at 23
and the music’s too loud
and you’re going too fast
and you’re drunk with the wind in your hair
and you know the feeling of love and light
bearing down on you all in one blinding rush.

It leaves you standing there
like a pile of smoking ash,
the smile and happiness wired
directly into your guts, and you know
YOU REALLY KNOW what it’s like
to come this close to collapse
and then laugh as you pull back
just before you can get pushed
straight over the edge.

That is the feeling of flying, my friend…that is the feeling of being alive.