Lily's Here from London

Lily's here from London
But only for the day

Being here, for her
Is like staring directly
Into the sun

She can only do it
For so long
Before parts of her
Start to hurt
And burn

Why don't we all go to London?
--She says

Why don't we quit our jobs and go to London?
Why don't we realize that everybody in the world needs to live in London
And if they're not, they're wasting away
And squandering their lives

Lily is the Iceman
And she cometh
Every two years

Or when somebody dies
But nobody's died in awhile
Not since John's father
So it's been two years

And now it's John's birthday
And Lily's in from London
And isn't that nice?

She's got stories from London
And presents from London
And pictures from London
And guilt from London
And a haircut from London
And, and, and, and--from London

She wears London clothes
And has started slowly sneaking
A bit of an accent into her speech
Hoping we won't notice
Knowing full well that we will
And that mockery and insults will ensue
And who knows?

Maybe it'll be three years before she returns again
Instead of two

Maybe the time in between
Will begin
To grow longer
Without us even noticing

And one day we'll say
Wasn't there a Lily once?

Didn't we know a Lily?

Lily is now from London
Not from here
And when someone at the bar
Asks her if she's from here
She takes a solid five minutes
Answering a simple question
With a complicated response

Yes, she's FROM here but she LIVES in London and it's been SO LONG that she feels like she's FROM London and actually feels NO connection to HERE-AT-ALL.

Got that?

We do
After all
We're from here
Not London

We're her 'here' friends
She has new friends now

London friends
Who are much smarter
And cooler
And more clever than we are

And we feel like asking her
If her new friends have to hear as much about us
As we have to hear about them

But we don't
Because she's here
So let's be pleasant

Besides, we already know the answer

We stay nice because
She flew in from London, after all
And it's a long flight
And she must be tired
And she means well
And she's Lily, you know?

She's Lily

She used to weigh three hundred pounds
Half of it sadness, but heavy all the same

She wrote poems on her hands
And liked boys with no names

She never smiled
She never told stories
She never embraced

And now we can see
That she thinks it was 'here'
It was this, this place
That made her that way

And we are a part of that place
We were responsible somehow
For that old Lily

And all of her pain
And all of her hurt
That was all us
Because we were here

Here is the problem
And we are here
And so we are the problem

Her new friends don't know
About the old Lily
And they probably never will

They get the lovely American girl
Who reads paperbacks in coffeeshops
And wears big funny hats

They hear very little about her time back home
And when she's gone for a week
She'll just say she had a cold

We are that cold
We are that lie

We're tucked away
In another part of her mind

Some of us miss her
And some of us...

Well

We're really just glad she's here
We're really just glad she's safe
We're happy she's finally able to smile
And whatever it took
To make that happen
Is fine
Is fine, by us

Lily's here from London
Didn't you hear?
Didn't you hear?

Better see her now
Because she won't be here
Much longer