This piece is about a man whom society has rejected. Perhaps it was inspired by someone in the artist's life, but it could also just be a hypothetical/fictional story about such a person.
The man's father never expressed love or for him, and from that the man has never been able to define love. The man's inheritance from his father appears to just be a chair. Perhaps the rest went to his brother who "held" the narrator down for sixty years (the father must have been playing favorites). Perhaps as a boy who was taught "he was the bad one," it became too much for the man who may have tried to down himself in a river.
The part that gets me is when the man speaks to his shadow. While listening I thought he was speaking to a lover, and then when I heard "Said the man, said the man to his shadow" there was a bit of a lump in my throat... that verse is particularly heavy. However so, the man did had a lover at one point in his life, hence the existence of a son he has not spoken to for 5 years. Maybe the man is addressing that lover in his life, except she is not beside him any longer (only his shadow is) because he hit her (abuse is a cyclical behavior).
This piece is about a man whom society has rejected. Perhaps it was inspired by someone in the artist's life, but it could also just be a hypothetical/fictional story about such a person.
The man's father never expressed love or for him, and from that the man has never been able to define love. The man's inheritance from his father appears to just be a chair. Perhaps the rest went to his brother who "held" the narrator down for sixty years (the father must have been playing favorites). Perhaps as a boy who was taught "he was the bad one," it became too much for the man who may have tried to down himself in a river.
The part that gets me is when the man speaks to his shadow. While listening I thought he was speaking to a lover, and then when I heard "Said the man, said the man to his shadow" there was a bit of a lump in my throat... that verse is particularly heavy. However so, the man did had a lover at one point in his life, hence the existence of a son he has not spoken to for 5 years. Maybe the man is addressing that lover in his life, except she is not beside him any longer (only his shadow is) because he hit her (abuse is a cyclical behavior).