Song for Bygones

While we are exchanging lines

making penance for old crimes

Under the bridge, biding time

you turn to me and say:

What have all your fortunes bought?

A treasure chest of anxious thought

A mind possessed and overwrought,

Oh, what a price to pay!

You remember me, all of nineteen,

words on a computer screen,

promises we both could mean,

but we could never keep

And if we could give objects life,

I'd be flesh and you'd be knife,

And I could not live as your wife,

because you'd sink too deep.

Now it's something in the past,

glimmers of a shadow cast,

A ship that never raised its mast,

A script we never played.

And seeing that we both have changed

the feelings in us rearranged,

you say I'm still mostly the same

And maybe, if I'd stayed--