Man on the Bridge

© 2020

The man on the bridge, puts aside the cold porridge that somebody left him
today.
He picks up the tattered old case and the battered accordion’s face meets the new day
He no longer recalls the cries and the calls, the bomb-blasts and the fall in the trench.
He lost his dear wife, one ear, and the good life, now he sleeps in the park on a bench

Freezing rain in the morning,
Silent snowfall at night
He can’t move his fingers by late afternoon
The man on the bridge has been playing
since the earliest light

He’s no virtuoso, no vocal Caruso, but there’s something strange here makes you pause in your day
He sees through closed eyelids, the tourists, the young kids,
The hippies, priests, peddlers and pimps on their way
He smells their agendas, their heartbreak surrenders, the practised cadenzas, the things they can’t say
Late night they come drunken, like him some are sunken, they mock and they jeer him to play

You wonder if you could end up the same…
And the sea-storm of life’s not simply a game
But the coin hits his bowl puts some hope in his soul
And he feels you but he can’t say your name
He sees you, but he can’t say your name

He plays through the Summer heat, Autumn rain, Winter snow
Sometimes stops for a minute with his head hung low
His arthritic digits, wont bend so he fidgets, and silently curses the fact he’s so slow
Remembers the time when he knew how to rhyme, when he could still keep time a long age ago
You can laugh at the savage, or smile at his courage, or spit and move on to wherever it is you have to go

Nobody knows where he comes from
Nobody knows where he stays
It’s hard to work out what he might live on
The man on the bridge moves in mysterious ways
Oh he moves in mysterious ways

There’s only one thing that will make him look up,
Its when he hears the sound of a coin hit his cup
He’ll smile and he’ll show you his stained Stonehenge teeth
but you suspect he’s blind cos his eyes stay closed up

And he knows that his music’s not part of the rubric that
Tells you there’s something to pay
And it isn’t the point that you’ve dropped him a coin
Its cos you gave him this time in your precious day

You wonder if you could end up the same…
And the sea-storm of life’s not simply a game
But the coin hits his bowl, puts some hope in his soul
And he feels you but he can’t say your name
He sees you but he can’t say your name
He remembers you but he can’t remember your name