And she looked at me with eyes so sad
Even the tears couldn’t bear to be there
And asked me, “Why are you leaving?”
She asked me, “Why are you leaving?”
And I said, “Baby it’s because of the dross in my soul, the exhaustion of woe, and the cost of my goals.
The badly sutured way that the past meets the future and so that the wounds will all heal that much sooner.
That great is a poor consolation for greater."
You see, I loved her so much but I also hated her.
"And all of the scheming it took to keep breathing and the fact that existing has become just grieving.
That’s why I am leaving.
That’s why I am leaving.”
She rolled over to the warm spot in the mattress
That was all I could leave her and then she asked this, “Why are you leaving?”
She asked me, “Why are you leaving?”
So I fed her clichés about ends and breaks, about fate and mistakes, and fatal aches, about what’s meant to be and the extent of me, about faults and flaws and the rawness of it all.
About enlightenment at someone else’s expense.
About risking oneself just to get someone else.
About risking oneself just to get someone else.
About the violent means of stealing fish from the sea.
And how not meaning to has no meaning.
That’s why I am leaving.
That’s why I am leaving.
She turned onto her back, her eyes narrowed to cracks
Her head hanging over the edge of the bed
Don’t know which of us was the right way up
But she had her own vision or just made a decision
‘Cause her body it rashed into sweet gooseflesh
And she jumped to her feet a mere breath-width from me
She said, “I know why you’re leaving and those aren’t the reasons.
You’ve invested your soul in a single goal.
Your every endeavor’s been creating a char’cter.
And your job was well done ’cause like every interesting one,
He’s not fit for existence, and the world relishes this
And works at him in a grim obsession
Steals all of his peace, grants him no surcease
Until the world is glutted and he is gutted.
Hippolytus and desire,
Hazel Motes and his barbed wire.
Gully Foyle’s tyger face and Gregor’s carapace
Christ and his redeeming,
Then she was screaming,
“That’s why you are leaving. That’s why you are leaving.”
And I threw up my hands, I said, “Baby, please land.
Your sorrow is more than your thoughts can withstand
But her eyes were so clear; the tears still wouldn’t appear.
And I mulled over leaving, I mulled over leaving.
But I said, “Baby, it’s because of the curve of the Earth, my Cesarean birth, and Wordsworth’s verse.
That up is not the only direction to break.
The deeper meaning of expiration dates.
The whiskey sour that clings to your throat.
The power and will of the Holy Ghost.
General entropy, the horror of memory.
The fact that deceiving rhymes apt with believing.
That’s why I am leaving.
That’s why I am leaving.