The city’s shimmer trembles on me like a faded dream,
Its drifting shadows circle round me on this pale-night scene.
Young faces pass as if they’d stepped out of another age,
And in their eyes, untold, unread, dim stories flicker on the page.

I feel their gazes, yet they never see,
The quiet world that still survives in me.
They only catch the shell time carved in place,
The mask the years have tightened round my face.

And they say: “Look, what’s he doing near the young again,
With that face that’s fought too many nights, too much pain?”
But they don’t look within, just see time’s heavy mask,
One even I can barely recognise at dawn, behind the glass.
I’m no satyr, no strange spectre on the scene,
Just an X-gen soul stuck at twenty-five, lost in between.
Who doesn’t dare to face the mirror’s deep and shattered seam,
Because he fears the crack might steal away the soul beneath.

My past’s a wrinkled, torn-out page from some abandoned diary,
Its colours fading, yet they cling to every corner deep inside me.
A younger rhythm still beats steady, certain once it had no end,
But time plays different melodies upon the skin it slowly bends.

If only they could see me once the way I used to be,
Not as I’m framed today by cruel reality.
I’m just a half-sung song, a quiet, trembling lullaby,
That tries to live, but every note is scared to rise or cry.

And they say: “Look, what’s he doing near the young again,
With that face that’s fought too many nights, too much pain?”
But they don’t look within, just see time’s heavy mask,
One even I can barely recognise at dawn, behind the glass.
I’m no satyr, no strange spectre on the scene,
Just an X-gen soul stuck at twenty-five, lost in between.
Who doesn’t dare to face the mirror’s deep and shattered seam,
Because he fears the crack might steal away the soul beneath.

If their relentless judgement ever quietened for a while,
They’d hear the song still echoing inside this borrowed exile:
A summer’s breath,
A crimson night,
A place where age had lost its hold,
And I was simply who I longed to be, and fear of growing old.

The lights burn out, the city folds into its hush at last,
Yet still I guard what little’s left of all my younger past:
A twenty-five-year shadow clinging,
Inside a body twice its age and sinking.

under the cracks

When my wife passed away, I was left alone with my teenage daughter. We were both devastated by the grief, but she completely shut herself off, as her friends had turned their backs on her, abandoning her in her time of need. I realised that through songs, I could reach her heart far better than with words. So I began writing songs for her, and in a way, I owe every song I've written to her.

under the cracks

diNero