And what remains is the shadow of my past
I look in the mirror and hate what I see
I don't recognize my face anymore
And wonder where all my dreams are gone
Feeling lost and empty
I know I can't turn back time
But I just don't want to give up
I can't give up

You can't seem to hold me here
You can't seem to let me go
So I can't find surrender, can't keep control
You turn me inside out and then
You want me outside in
You spin me all around and then
You ask me not to spin

泣いていました 大好きな君が

Jazz

I was driving home that afternoon
in some dilated condition of sensitivity
of the kind known only to certain poets
and more or less everybody else:

the sun of 6 P.M. glaring orangely through the trees
as through the bars of some kind of cage
and the poor citizens of Pecore Street waiting for the bus
with their sorrowful posture and bad feet

I admit when I'm in one of these moods I find it
a little too easy to believe the trees are suffering,
to see the twisted branches as outstretched arthritic hands,
and the Spanish moss dripping from their scabby limbs
as parasitic bunting.

Someone had given me a jazz CD
he had thought I would enjoy,
but the song unfurling on the stereo that day
seemed a kind of torture-music,

played by wildly unhappy musicians
on instruments that had been bent in shipping,
then harnessed by some masochist composer
for an experiment on the nature of obstruction.

But of all the shrieking horns and drums
it was the passionate effort of a certain defective trumpet
to escape from its predetermined plot
that seemed to be telling a story that I knew:

veering back and forth, banging off the walls,
dripping a trail of blood
until finally it shattered through a window and disappeared.

For some reason I didn't understand,
it had to suffer before it was allowed to rest.
It was permitted to rest before being recaptured.

That was part of the composition.
That was the only kind of freedom
we were ever going to know.