A Simple Twist Of Fate

There is a song you play that keeps my heart broken.  One time it convinced me the world became empty, everyone got on a spaceship and left me behind.  They didn't even say goodbye or leave a note, or even give me a reason why they were going.  They all just left. 

The song is a cold, damp night with no ending.  No matter how many blankets I have on the bed I just can't get warm when it's chords play in my head.  You breathe the words and that particular chill comes on me.  Like a sick old man, dying alone in his bed in a shotgun shack.  Wondering how long it will be before someone finds my body after I am gone.

How do you write a song like that and still maintain a reason to move into tomorrow with a straight face?  It is one thing to relate to your words, the feeling they explain.  It is an entirely different thing to take an ache and describe the depth it runs with harrowing detail.  It is telling a secret that no one ever spills or unintentionally blurts when tricked.  To tell the story and not be burned by the release, the friction as it escapes, is black magic.

I want to have your command of the words.  I want to understand the feeling of holding the reins when the horses begin to lather.  You were the master smithy before I was even born and you've mostly seemed bored since before I was born as well.  You wrote this song when I was just a boy, a lucid time for you.

I think we burned you and you became burned out on us.  We stalked you and asked why that line has no contraction when the rest are littered with apostrophes, and why this line is about a shirt.  It was important to know, I suppose.  Maybe you just liked the way that shirt looked?  A compliment to a shirt maker that rounds out a line, because it just seemed the right thing to do at the time.  Maybe you don't even know?

I'm Memphis and Mobile and Mississippi and you rode my roads and took me for more than face value.  Maybe that is why this song means so much to me now?  You wrote it to ease my insecurities when none of the learned have taken the time to say, "It's alright."  Maybe you did it because it was a good deed?  Give the man with a busted overall gallous a song he can relate to when his luck runs dry, he has nothing else in this old world.  Not even a champion from afar.