The Story (life After Hemingway)

I was dreaming about Hemingway

And wondering why he quit before he was done

At the end of a shotgun, He just gave up

His final chapter left unfinished and rough

Well, so it goes/ that before the sun rose

He pulled himself from his bed

And alone in his mind/ his body left behind

He decided he would be better off dead

And after everything that he wrote, he didn't bother with a suicide note

When before he could always find one true word

So the old man fell

Alone in his own hell

Somewhere on an Idaho morning

And in the distance tolled the bell for whom the money -men were left to sell

The story the man should have told himself

Became someone else's book upon the shelf

Chorus

When out in the streets they mixed truth with lies

To sell what the old man did as glamorous and wise

They said the great one went out in a blaze of glory

While the rest of us were left behind to sell the story

I guess emotion doesn't matter when your merchandising pain

Yet it is done so often we have forgotten who to blame

So left in the hands of others to describe his final hour

We are deprived of how the man himself could have said it with a quiet kind of power

Sold as a t-shirt that he could not defend

We don't have to confront the violence

Of the old man's end

Chorus

Or how the truth we know is mixed with lies

Lost somewhere between the who and the whys

Or the madness in leaving in a blaze of glory

When we are left behind/ to tell the story