Lantern Man

I woke with the taste of lilac smoke and a bible folded in my sleeve. 

The mirror in the hallway blinked— but it never looked at me.

A voice hissed up from the radiator: “You’ll sign what you won’t believe.” 

And the ink was dry on a vow I made before I’d even learned to grieve.

(Chorus) I am the Lantern Man, love, I walk where the shadow bleeds. 

Down in the library of locked-up dreams, I feed what the silence needs. 

I carry your name in a matchbox, dear, next to a feather and a nail— 

And I light my way through the unmarked ways where your heartbeat used to fail.

I caught a train that never ran, and it took me somewhere cold— 

Where the snow fell thick on my father’s grin and the clocks were all unsold.

You called it fate. I called it fun. I called it what the devil told— 

As I danced with my own shadow in a coat of marigold.

(Chorus) I am the Lantern Man, child, I walk where the mirror cracks. 

With a spine full of sleeping contracts and a monkey on my back. 

I wrote my name in backwards flame on the belly of the moon— 

And I sing to the ghosts that love me most in a crooked gospel tune.

(Bridge) Now the silence speaks in riddles and the wallpaper peels like skin. 

There’s a knock from the room where no one moved in— 

And a hand that writes on the wall within: "You belong to what you never begin."

(Final Chorus – slower) I am the Lantern Man, now— the one who carries the key. 

But the door it fits is buried, three miles beneath the sea. 

And if I knock, and no one comes, and the dark just takes my hand— 

Then I’ll lie down with the mirror, and I’ll dream I understand.