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The Lonely Man

by Stryngs

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lyrics

Her self-made man proclaims, "I am content!"
and shows her every luxury and desperate love
pinned across his walls.
Walls like a hectic curriculum vitae;
walls like a garish scrapbook resumé.
She suffocates between deliberate gold cushions
and smoothed-out throws,
empty wicker chairs and ornamental bongos.
She glimpses his travels between
African statues and dark-wood totems;
the chrome wink of a kettle
from the distant shores of Ikea.

Empty Abalone shells line his bookshelves.
She turns away and takes her evening in.

Cerise paper lanterns celebrate the porch as
he tingles with insomnia to the cicada shrill.
For he's a man of extraordinary morals,
and he's a man of ordinary sins.
"Make me pure!" he prays, gently turning his little god to the wall.
By video-glow he holds her tight and intangible.
He makes her up from memory: paints her face
like a girl he loved faintly from school;
spritzes her with the sense of magazine women;

until she becomes unknown
and he becomes nocturnal.
She turns away.
He takes his evening in.

He chants, "My happiness does not depend on others,"
But, somewhere between the denial and the self-denial,
there are smooth legs, trapped between the neat folds of
his rough, cotton sheets.

He loves her carefully, from a self-improvement book,
to keep the headiness at bay.
But as he edges in,
she spins away free from the barely-hidden hook;
she spins away free from the writhing bait.

Frustrated, he plunges into the Indian Ocean
- as harsh as reprimand -
singeing the lust beneath heavy turquoise waves.
He emerges, soaked-through and cold,
Returning alone to his relentless nothingness,
he lays another shell down,
like an eerie, opalescent cradle.

Empty abalone shells line his bookshelves.
She turns away and takes her evening in.

Empty abalone shells line his bookshelves.
She turns away and takes her evening in.

Empty abalone shells line his bookshelves.
He turns away and takes his evening in.

credits

released May 1, 2006
Giles/Stringer

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all rights reserved

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Stryngs Hampshire, UK

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