There's a shadow there
He says On Nights Like This
And paints a tale
Of a man who is no more
Of a man who sighs long heavy whispers
That fade into the melancholy of the wind
And leave behind a silver sovereign
That reaches for the light
At the end of the street.
There's a shadow there
Who says On Nights Like This
And leaves all weepy and depressed and sour
With a spiraling story
Of a man without connections
Of a man without happiness
Of a man blinder than false prophets
And more anxious than anything else
Who presently clings to the past
To be dragged by the future
He is seen there on the corner
And has his empty hands held by things he can't feel
People tell me they tell us
That On Nights Like This
He holds onto nothing and waits for everything
People tell us that his words mean nothing
They’re as empty as his hands
This man smokes filterless cigarettes
This man is indented into the world and indentured to everyone else
This man is prone to panic
This man is used to uselessness
And takes pride in his being alone.
On nights like this I think about that thing I read somewhere in, I think, a National Geographic, about how 25 percent of the time, we are alone and wished we weren’t. But there’s little we can do about wishful thinking and hoping because, nights like this, loneliness is pervasive in my small room on my small cot. Looking left and right there is blackness that is a symbol for emptiness and I reach out to touch the edge of the cot so that I’m positive that there isn’t any chance of me falling or hurting myself. I have this big fear of falling in my sleep, you know those dreams where you’re falling and you don’t know how you started falling or anything like that. I read somewhere, I can’t remember the place, that if you hit the floor in those dreams, you can have a heart attack so heavy that you can die. Most of the time the fear is so heavy in the room that I find it impossible to fall asleep and instead I think of that National Geographical line about how we wished we weren’t lonely.
On nights like this, there are pigeons on the balcony, being unearthly quiet and part of me wants to leap off the cot and wake them up so that they might hoot or coo and make some sounds that would break the silence and the loneliness in the room and we’d sit and stare at each other so that could tell it how envious of it I am, envious that it can’t over think itself to death, that it has no worries except sex and children and food. And most of the time, I think about what it’d be like to just have that to worry about because if you can do that, then in the realm of the pigeon you wouldn’t be a failure and things of that nature. Rather though, I sit here and grow depressed, no not depressed, more like melancholy at the decisions you have to make and the National Geographic statistic, and the fact that I kind of am a failure. So I just dwell on that for most of the time. I think that if you dwell on your failures, it is a very rewarding and enlightening experience. So I sit there, bowlegged in the darkness of my room on my bed and think about becoming a dropout, the disappointment in the faces of my family, and the lies that my grandparents make to cover up their shame. Moreover, I think about all the praise I received, the standing ovation at graduation and the countless people who stopped to tell me how proud they were and how I now had these high expectations of myself. I think of the girls I’ve slept with and left all because they thought I had some direction in life whereas life for them was a symphony of one-night-stands and the ability in the future, if one of their hook-ups made it on the television or somewhere glamorous like that, they could look up at the TV and talk about how they screwed one night. Or maybe they’d milk the newfound celebrity dry with accusations and blackmail threatening to bring up that night spent in an NYU dorm with pants puddle around ankles and sweating and moaning and premature ejaculations even though they didn’t have that problem so it’d be whatever, but I’m sure they’d still suffer, even for that blatant lie.
