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lyrics

Meet Michael Denisovich
One rough and tumble son of a bitch
The hardcorest Communist the Komsomol had ever seen
He grew up praising Lenin's name
His mecca was Karl Marx's grave
And November 7th was his favorite holiday
Then Hitler came knocking on his door
They called it the Great Patriotic War
And in a furor of fealty he fought for his fatherland
With a gun in his hand and a knife in his boot
He always knew just when to shoot
He killed fifteen fascists in his first four months on the front

It snowed in Moscow on December 29th
Of the year 1939
Those flakes they just kept falling down,
Millions piled up on the ground
And they hardly ever even made a sound

Back home at a party and he got a laugh
When he made a joke about Comrade Stalin's mustache
But he didn't know his friend was informing for the NKVD
In the middle of the night they came knockin' on his door
Barely gave him time to get his pants off the floor
As his wife kept screaming "This must be a mistake!"
They threw him in a dank, windowless room
Beat his face til it turned all black and blue
Crushed his nuts with the heel of a shiny leather boot
They said "Sign this, we don't care if it's true
We can do whatever we want with you
If you confess, we'll go easy," well he did, they gave him 25 years

No trial, no jury, no chance to set it straight
Just sentenced under Article 58
Anti-Soviet agitation and capitalist sympathy
At the train loading up for the prison camp
He was prodded and whipped up the loading ramp
Packed in so tight like a horse into a bottle of glue
You think smashing rocks every day for 12 hours sound rough?
Try doing it when they don't feed you enough
To keep the meat from melting off your bones when it's 20 below
The beatings hadn't stopped at the interrogation,
No, lucky if he got off with just an abrasion
From the butt of the gun of the guard for working too slow

When his wife tried to send a letter to him
Those clever foxes, you know what they did?
They said "Prisoner denied the right of correspondence"
I think that what they meant to say
Was "Prisoner denied the light of day
Because we put a bullet in the base of his skull three years ago"

This story may have been fabricated
But don't go thinking it's been exaggerated
Like it could never happen here to an American like you
Oh, fathers and sons, and mothers too
All thrown into our own gulag stew
'Cause the NSA found all the bad shit we do

credits

from Lexicon Carnival, released February 11, 2015

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The Messy Jacksons Portland, Oregon

Do like like funny sad sound words? Then Messy Jacksons have good sound words for you. You like finger string picky fretty? Messy Jackson have other good sound words for you. Messy Jacksons is sometimes one, sometimes many, sometimes acoustic, sometimes electronic, always funny sad sound words from the Portland that stole its name from the other Portland. ... more

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