Hide and Seek
Today I read a message, postmarked from your birthday
No salutations, just another day alive.
It was the day you upped and realised the picture wasn’t as it seemed,
Drove to a bridge, filmed your goodbyes.
In that sound so high and lonesome,
Well, what was it you would’ve told them?
Was it the 24-hour news,
Or how the world had made you old?
Was it the way you smoked your cigarette,
just to have something to hold?
Well my friend, I would come running
When it hurts so bad you can’t sleep.
We could go and play hide and seek.
I met an old man at a hardware store one morning,
In a nervous kind of weather I could recognise.
A crossed-out name in their friends’ phonebooks,
Rudderless without his bride.
He’d kissed her cold brow for the last time.
He told me, “Live your life with joy unbound
But if a hand to hold should go to ground.
They could bring their cavalry, their garlands,
Pack a sandwich and a gun.
Because they’ll have to wake up early,
If they’re going to best you, son.
Brother, when the wolf is at your door
The button named 'ejector seat'
Will aid you in this crooked waltz called hide and seek.”
My love and I made bones from bread, blue eyes a' shining.
And the trees all of the fields did clap their hands.
But you know that time’s the great revealer,
Foundations forged in silt and clay,
Disguised an hourglass of sinking sand.
A single toothbrush stands in its holder.
Where does love go when it’s over?
Is it the place for all the bills, concealed -
Some ancient text we can’t decode?
Amidst the war that’s waged inside a mind,
Or the past you can’t let go?
I have broken floorboards into two,
Tunnelled til I couldn’t speak.
An excavation, to find something to believe.
You know, the heart’s a lonely hunter,
A killer out among the reeds.
Out in the wilderness, where we play hide and seek.