From the album Swaydif - Single
This is about someone who has learned to offer themselves up for violence before anyone can ask for it. The narrator presents drowning, stabbing, and burial as things that happen to them, but every image reveals active participation. They are not a passenger on a sinking ship. They are the one steering it down.
If I'm alone, then whose hands are these? / And why won't they bleed?
The narrator feels controlled by body parts that do not belong to them. Hands that will not bleed suggests they have already tried to hurt themselves and failed, or that the damage they are doing does not register as real injury.
I can't stand the sight of lifeboats. / On this boat that rocks atop the sea.
Rescue equipment is unbearable to look at. The narrator is allergic to the possibility of being saved, which means drowning is not something happening to them but something they need to keep happening.
Knife throws. / There's no more room in this back. / You'll have to settle for my throat. / Is that okay?
Offering your throat is framed as politeness, like you are accommodating someone else's needs. The question 'Is that okay?' makes the violence sound consensual, but consent under these conditions is just rehearsed self-destruction with manners.
I'd like to live over your head, and under your skin. / Then stand on the bodies of the friends that I've buried.
The narrator wants intimacy that requires burial. Getting close means killing what was there before, and the only way to be inside someone is to first eliminate everyone else. I am not sure if 'friends that I've buried' means people the narrator has abandoned or people they have internalized so completely that the original person is gone.
Please excuse my tongue. / It moves without permission.
The tongue that speaks without permission mirrors the hands that do not bleed. The narrator experiences their own voice as something they cannot control, which means they are never responsible for what they say, even when what they say is an apology for saying it.
The repeated 'Swaydif' at the end might be an acronym or a mantra, but it reads like a word the narrator invented to stop themselves from saying what they actually mean. The song ends where it started, on a sinking ship, with a tongue that moves without permission. Nothing has been resolved because resolution would mean getting off the boat.