He'd been watching the world
Through a whiskey glass,
Seeing every distorted image
Of her that passed.

A decade ago,
They were adoloscent children
Living on their parents' means-
Adolescent children,
With adolescent, childhood dreams.

Sometimes, it takes separation
To recognize guilt,
The meaning of content,
What matters and what does not,
What lives, and what will rot.

Whiskey, they say,
Has a habit of wiping you away;
Legend states that
If you pour it over a broken heart,
The cut will heal...
But legend also has a way
Of blending what is false
And what is real.

Skip a few heartbeats
And a few pyramid schemes,
Stop half-way and you'll see
How they did love eachother once,
But not like she needed to,
And he
Not as much as those childish dreams.
Chalk it up to loneliness,
Weariness, curiosity,
Or what have you,
But there was an intimacy,
That much is true.

Sometimes, it takes lonliness
To reach an understanding,
A sense of self,
How to keep your heart upon a shelf.
Sometimes,
If you can figure out the grief,
You can figure out the relief.

He'd been watching the world
Through a whiskey glass,
Noticing how those images passed,
Feeling he was free at last.

Standing silently upon his raised throne,
His stage,
His front porch to the world,
He played his fiddle
Like an Appalachian yell,
So that even the dust in the air
Hung on every note
As they rose and fell.
They fled from the man in perfect time,
Like jewels falling from the crown,
Like a storm leaving its cloud,
Like Earth birthing her leaves and grass,
Like memories
From an empty whiskey glass.

What I mean to say,
Is that if you're sitting there,
Listening to 'Mozambique',
And trying to figure out
What happened to 'you and me':
Release me from you
Like an Appalachian yell-
Yell, yell,
Until to feel the quell,
For I have screamed you out of me,
And then,
At last,
'You and me'
Can both be free.