Invisible

After being for so many years

the life and soul of the party

it’s weird

I’m invisible

Whatever I have said and done

doesn’t matter in this chatter and hum

I’m invisible

I’m here but you can’t see me

I’m invisible

It’s queer how gradually

I’ve become invisible

Look at me, the absentee

disappearing finally

Goodbye

Is it magic or the truth?

Strange psychology?

Or justified by the end of youth?

Can you hear me?

Can you see me?

Am I really even here?

I’m invisible

It’s too late to find an excuse

The party’s over and I’m not much use

tonight

Am I tragic or a joke

wrapped in my invisibility cloak?

Well, quite

I’m here but you can’t see me

I’m invisible

It’s queer how gradually

I’ve become invisible

It’s a journey so they say

but in this desert

I was only a hazy, lazy mirage anyway

2011. Chris and I both had the same idea for a song about how growing old is a process of becoming gradually invisible. I read a column in a newspaper complaining that a woman over the age of fifty walking into a social gathering may as well be invisible, and I thought, ‘Try being a gay man over the age of fifty …’ But in writing the lyric, I also imagined it being the commentary of someone dead, a ghost haunting the parties he used to attend, now invisible, possibly forgotten.