When it’s late at night, I don’t wanna do nothing.
I look up your expression in the pictures that I find;
and my heart is beaten, my mind is broken…
I am running out of candles, and I am running out of steam.
I know we made another kind of trade that time…
I don’t ask what it’s for.
Driving out to the aqueduct, after the bars are closed.
Back when we were young stragglers, all alone in a silent world…
I go over the pictures, and wonder… What’s become?
You change your address, you make yourself new again.
I imagine — it’s another kind of trade inside…
I don’t know what it’s for.
You always liked to laugh. Hell, I don’t mind to watch you laughing…
But when you say you’ll call, well, I can see it’s not gonna happen.
I suppose you think that it don’t mean nothing…
But just to be where you are, and catch you looking back at me:
It’s another kind of trade that buys /
My way through the door
My way through the door
My way through the door…
But just to be where you are, and catch you looking back at me:
It’s another kind of trade that buys /
My way through the door
My way through the door
My way through the door…
A cynical older friend holds a metaphysical glass in the air over the phone, quotes, “Certain songs get scratched into our souls.” Right in the moment, it’s easy to turn your head and spit. I did… But on the roof, in the dark, at the cusp of morning looking down the hill…there’s a certain space inside you find, a mental tone, a favorite turn of phrase that bubbles up and preoccupies. I first heard this song when I was 17 years old—a young straggler, all alone in a silent world—now I’m 24 and I wonder what’s become… Yesterday I told someone that the only gift I feel time has given me is perspective, that the only feeling I have about the future is uncertainty, that the world’s ears have grown only more cauliflowered with ego and dense evil, and how perhaps it’s only appropriate that we are standing on the precipice; unsure how deep the chasm goes, possessed with instinctual fear, an even deeper compulsion to dive. Everything will change but certain songs, and even then perhaps you’ll find they open a different lock than before…
