Chasing Yesterday
Chasing Yesterday
1
Our cameras catch echoes,
And the ghost-like faces fade
As snow angels in the dawn,
The ghosts of yesterday
Stranded on a Polaroid
In Technicolor graves,
Withering the cigarettes
Crawl in a plastic tray.
In silence while their dying
Their tobacco burns away.
2
A thumbprint on a skyscraper,
A smudge across a page,
That’s all the new exhibit
of the toy they would display.
Left behind their statues lone,
God’s experiment went wrong
3
These fraying letters
fortune tellers
Everything’s okay.
You walk the ground,
Where once we stood
And sang our simple songs
We walked between the raindrops
And an old man played along:
They danced in the rain and snow,
A ragtag fool’s parade.
These twilight years are getting cold
There’s not much left to say
They want to just belong again
In some lost yesterday
captured by another photo
a scene from some old play
The old guitarist plucked along,
We are not alone
4
More and more the echoes go,
In endless imitation rows.
The summer comes,
the summer goes.
The ballerina and her rose,
Her unkempt hair and crown of gold,
The ballerina has grown old.
A self absorbed pale apparition
Her weak ears and weaker vision.
5
Bags under her once bright eyes,
to sleeps—no greater pain.
I never want to say goodbye,
She walked between the rain.
She left behind just memories,
Of disappearing dreams poor-seen.
6
A juvenile search meaning,
For something more profound
Has left me looking like a sketch
Of a too lonely clown
Who tries too hard, to meaning show,
arranging it in little rows
So someone might look down
And on this page some meaning found
I found my way to paradise,
Yet then I turned around.
7
Upon the lake, we used to take,
our rods and reels we’d go,
In an old boat we would float
Our fishing nets we’d throw.
When the moonlight breaks the night,
On the lake Miss Luna glows
We woke at dawn and walked along
The shore and looked above
We turned around when heard the sound
of a far off cooing dove.
1
We went there in the summer,
and we went there every year
The water quiet glimmered bright,
The lake itself was clear.
We stopped when my father died
He said it all would be okay,
And a list of other lies,
“I loved,” he said, I cried.
2
No more floating in the sun,
The tangled knots had come undone,
The rods and reels would break.
No more trips fishing trips for us
A childhood blown away like dust
I lost my father but why bother,
There’s no one left to take.
just effigies of loved ones gone.
3
On weekends and the gravel roads,
At the end a fishing hole
Always looking but to go
Down those old dirt roads and look
At winding roads beside the brook
The buzzards must remember too
This always feels like déjà vu.
4
Down the maze of those dirt roads,
The beauty of the moonlight showed
What they wished that they would find
Across the bridge around the bind
All my skies are inkdrop lies.
Pretty are they not? some say.
Why chase you your own yesterday
The grass a water-color green
A phony connoisseur’s scene
Dressed as a gaudy play.
5
The scene dissolves and die the sheen
As rusted parts of a machine.
Looking for what we used to find,
Across the bridge around the bind,
So pretty are they not? He said,
Where do all they go?
the pine combs blew about like leaves
and-scattered on the road
6
Trees and flowers,
Swift they blow
The trees leak leaves into the road
And then when the wind has blown,
The jigsaw shapes left on the lawn,
Ten years of memories were strewn
along the gutters in the street.
7
Wavering as though a dance,
when lightning strikes by happen chance.
Through the tumult of the sky
The rains picked up but to subside
And the dying puddles dried
Vanished underneath the sun.
It rolls around and upside down
Another cold day maybe rain
To watch life from a window pane.
1
Why celebrate the sadness of our lives,
And arrange our suffering to rhyme
As though those moments matter most,
When we still chase beloved ghosts
Long flittered down the hall.
It drifts about into my ears
bit by bit destroys my mind
They knock about inside my head
And I drown them all with wine
I have to take my medicine,
Maybe lay down and unwind
Many has a flower grown,
And kindled by the vine.
2
It gets no better, so it seems,
when walking through our waking dreams
Yesterday, when life was young
We ran through wheatfields, happy, dumb.
At night we knelt to pray:
Looking back, to think about
The ghost of yesterday.
Lamenting what we lost, to find,
The ashes blown away.
3
When I stand before the grand inquisitor,
Inevitably myself,
When I must justify my life, I’ll say,
Simply that I somewhat tried, some days,
That’s the problem all alone.
The list gets longer like the songs,
Written by candle light.
We pine away while strung along,
Into life then out of sight.
4
Twenty years, not much to say,
Too many pills and cigarettes,
A never ending stairway,
Oh how awful to know—
The door at the top of the stairway is closed.
Too many pills and cigarettes,
Pomnet, don’t forget.
We’ve looked into the past and saw,
Days of happiness, and all,
Days to chase if but to fall.
The bird songs of paradise,
Their songs of beauty sung,
They’ve sang for one hundred years
Generations in the sun.
My epitaph I’m sure will read,
The best is yet to come.
5
What can we do to help the doomed,
What isn’t being done?
Why do they need a little prick
In the morning to have fun?
Aware of our meaningless is for us
The disease of a generation
The side effect for all our woe
Is our lamentation and the self imposed,
Our lamentations,
Of the day that dances on the string,
The morrow a new line to bring.
6
Aware of living with no meaning,
The disease of a generation,
There is no one in charge,
And that’s the thing.
We sing about our suffering,
And somehow that brings joy.
Keep making that face,
It’ll get stuck like that,
Regret is to mourn history
Whenever we’re looking back.
7
Every day is called a present,
Life the gift to throw away
But it’s better not to care
Than chase forever yesterdays
Our heroes blew their brains out,
And left behind their songs,
Songs of lamentation,
Songs of life gone wrong.
The life as a lonely war,
Against the devil in the mind
We’ve been down the road before
Though often left behind
Dead end just make a circle
It happens every time.
1
The cameras catch echoes
And they play the old movies
They talk about that special day
The one that still we all can see
When the universe aligned at night
In that perfect memory.
2
What is now a point in time to dwell,
On some past unhappiness
or of some future hell.
They’ll never be a day lick that
When later we’ll sit around, look back.
3
And see it perfecting standing there.
In a Chinese dress with brunette hair,
Her eyes fixed on tomorrow where
She would get to dance
With stars along her neck
And flowers there by happen-chance
It had to rain that day.
Her make-up running down her face
Her hair in disarray
And never did I look as then
So wistful at the day.
4
The sun came out, the rain gave way,
Later on that night we played
In the storm and danced around
To that pitter-patter sound
When water hits the roof.
It was better than the glitz,
Of that old gaudy ballroom.
5
Where once I waited, as a child,
Looking at her across the aisle
Through the other people at the dance,
Between the couples caught a glance
Of her trying to look away.
When she looked I did the same,
We had nothing to say.
6
Later in my life I went,
Back to the ballroom, just to sit
And stare across the room.
I think about that day a lot,
The corny theme of my life.
7
I sat there wishing she would walk
Across the room to me, to talk
Say anything, it doesn’t matter,
Have something to say,
don't live but to regret the day.
1
Our cameras catch echoes,
And the ghost-like faces fade
As snow angels in the dawn,
The ghosts of yesterday
Stranded on a Polaroid
In Technicolor graves,
Withering the cigarettes
Crawl in a plastic tray.
In silence while their dying
Their tobacco burns away.
2
A thumbprint on a skyscraper,
A smudge across a page,
That’s all the new exhibit
of the toy they would display.
Left behind their statues lone,
God’s experiment went wrong
3
These fraying letters
fortune tellers
Everything’s okay.
You walk the ground,
Where once we stood
And sang our simple songs
We walked between the raindrops
And an old man played along:
They danced in the rain and snow,
A ragtag fool’s parade.
These twilight years are getting cold
There’s not much left to say
They want to just belong again
In some lost yesterday
captured by another photo
a scene from some old play
The old guitarist plucked along,
We are not alone
4
More and more the echoes go,
In endless imitation rows.
The summer comes,
the summer goes.
The ballerina and her rose,
Her unkempt hair and crown of gold,
The ballerina has grown old.
A self absorbed pale apparition
Her weak ears and weaker vision.
5
Bags under her once bright eyes,
to sleeps—no greater pain.
I never want to say goodbye,
She walked between the rain.
She left behind just memories,
Of disappearing dreams poor-seen.
6
A juvenile search meaning,
For something more profound
Has left me looking like a sketch
Of a too lonely clown
Who tries too hard, to meaning show,
arranging it in little rows
So someone might look down
And on this page some meaning found
I found my way to paradise,
Yet then I turned around.
7
Upon the lake, we used to take,
our rods and reels we’d go,
In an old boat we would float
Our fishing nets we’d throw.
When the moonlight breaks the night,
On the lake Miss Luna glows
We woke at dawn and walked along
The shore and looked above
We turned around when heard the sound
of a far off cooing dove.
1
We went there in the summer,
and we went there every year
The water quiet glimmered bright,
The lake itself was clear.
We stopped when my father died
He said it all would be okay,
And a list of other lies,
“I loved,” he said, I cried.
2
No more floating in the sun,
The tangled knots had come undone,
The rods and reels would break.
No more trips fishing trips for us
A childhood blown away like dust
I lost my father but why bother,
There’s no one left to take.
just effigies of loved ones gone.
3
On weekends and the gravel roads,
At the end a fishing hole
Always looking but to go
Down those old dirt roads and look
At winding roads beside the brook
The buzzards must remember too
This always feels like déjà vu.
4
Down the maze of those dirt roads,
The beauty of the moonlight showed
What they wished that they would find
Across the bridge around the bind
All my skies are inkdrop lies.
Pretty are they not? some say.
Why chase you your own yesterday
The grass a water-color green
A phony connoisseur’s scene
Dressed as a gaudy play.
5
The scene dissolves and die the sheen
As rusted parts of a machine.
Looking for what we used to find,
Across the bridge around the bind,
So pretty are they not? He said,
Where do all they go?
the pine combs blew about like leaves
and-scattered on the road
6
Trees and flowers,
Swift they blow
The trees leak leaves into the road
And then when the wind has blown,
The jigsaw shapes left on the lawn,
Ten years of memories were strewn
along the gutters in the street.
7
Wavering as though a dance,
when lightning strikes by happen chance.
Through the tumult of the sky
The rains picked up but to subside
And the dying puddles dried
Vanished underneath the sun.
It rolls around and upside down
Another cold day maybe rain
To watch life from a window pane.
1
Why celebrate the sadness of our lives,
And arrange our suffering to rhyme
As though those moments matter most,
When we still chase beloved ghosts
Long flittered down the hall.
It drifts about into my ears
bit by bit destroys my mind
They knock about inside my head
And I drown them all with wine
I have to take my medicine,
Maybe lay down and unwind
Many has a flower grown,
And kindled by the vine.
2
It gets no better, so it seems,
when walking through our waking dreams
Yesterday, when life was young
We ran through wheatfields, happy, dumb.
At night we knelt to pray:
Looking back, to think about
The ghost of yesterday.
Lamenting what we lost, to find,
The ashes blown away.
3
When I stand before the grand inquisitor,
Inevitably myself,
When I must justify my life, I’ll say,
Simply that I somewhat tried, some days,
That’s the problem all alone.
The list gets longer like the songs,
Written by candle light.
We pine away while strung along,
Into life then out of sight.
4
Twenty years, not much to say,
Too many pills and cigarettes,
A never ending stairway,
Oh how awful to know—
The door at the top of the stairway is closed.
Too many pills and cigarettes,
Pomnet, don’t forget.
We’ve looked into the past and saw,
Days of happiness, and all,
Days to chase if but to fall.
The bird songs of paradise,
Their songs of beauty sung,
They’ve sang for one hundred years
Generations in the sun.
My epitaph I’m sure will read,
The best is yet to come.
5
What can we do to help the doomed,
What isn’t being done?
Why do they need a little prick
In the morning to have fun?
Aware of our meaningless is for us
The disease of a generation
The side effect for all our woe
Is our lamentation and the self imposed,
Our lamentations,
Of the day that dances on the string,
The morrow a new line to bring.
6
Aware of living with no meaning,
The disease of a generation,
There is no one in charge,
And that’s the thing.
We sing about our suffering,
And somehow that brings joy.
Keep making that face,
It’ll get stuck like that,
Regret is to mourn history
Whenever we’re looking back.
7
Every day is called a present,
Life the gift to throw away
But it’s better not to care
Than chase forever yesterdays
Our heroes blew their brains out,
And left behind their songs,
Songs of lamentation,
Songs of life gone wrong.
The life as a lonely war,
Against the devil in the mind
We’ve been down the road before
Though often left behind
Dead end just make a circle
It happens every time.
1
The cameras catch echoes
And they play the old movies
They talk about that special day
The one that still we all can see
When the universe aligned at night
In that perfect memory.
2
What is now a point in time to dwell,
On some past unhappiness
or of some future hell.
They’ll never be a day lick that
When later we’ll sit around, look back.
3
And see it perfecting standing there.
In a Chinese dress with brunette hair,
Her eyes fixed on tomorrow where
She would get to dance
With stars along her neck
And flowers there by happen-chance
It had to rain that day.
Her make-up running down her face
Her hair in disarray
And never did I look as then
So wistful at the day.
4
The sun came out, the rain gave way,
Later on that night we played
In the storm and danced around
To that pitter-patter sound
When water hits the roof.
It was better than the glitz,
Of that old gaudy ballroom.
5
Where once I waited, as a child,
Looking at her across the aisle
Through the other people at the dance,
Between the couples caught a glance
Of her trying to look away.
When she looked I did the same,
We had nothing to say.
6
Later in my life I went,
Back to the ballroom, just to sit
And stare across the room.
I think about that day a lot,
The corny theme of my life.
7
I sat there wishing she would walk
Across the room to me, to talk
Say anything, it doesn’t matter,
Have something to say,
don't live but to regret the day.