Al Stewart: Night of the 4th of may

And the days they flew by And the leaves fell from the trees And many times you came around And many times you slept with me And every time that we made love You wrote it down in your diary Lady of ladies But I would always say to you Don't ask about tomorrow Give what you have, take what you need Your time is only now Don't try to tie me down to promises I live for today, today is all there is And freedom seems to be everything to me I took you down to a party On the night of the 4th of May And a strange and growing restlessness Had hung in the air all day The need to try and tear down And destroy all that we'd made Lady of ladies You whispered in my ear and asked me If I fancied her You told me that he'd phoned you When I was in America Daring each other just to say okay Swop for tonight, didn't I always say That freedom seems to be everything to me And she came and she sat down beside me And you found an excuse to go downstairs And she smiled and made The kind of conversation that you do And later on she said 'My last train has gone Oh I wonder if you could run me home' And I found vou in the hallway and told you That was all that I would do Just run her home and it's through Oh I thought you knewBut I must confess I laid my head on her breast And it seemed so hard To pull it away Her hand touched my hand And her eyes were offering the rest If it wasn't for you, oh I would have stayed But I came back home through the morning To find you lying awake And I knew all at once what you'd done And I heard myself say "Why did you have to sleep with him Anyone else Wouldn't have mattered Half As much as him" I don't want to touch you Somehow you feel unclean I just wish that you Were five hundred miles away from me Don't talk at all, don't start to cry Just pack up your things Lady of ladies And though I'd always told myself That when our time ended I'd walk away with no regrets And no attempts to stay Somehow it doesn't seem to be that way I find I'm needing every word you say This freedom seems to be everything to me And you went up to Cambridge And you stayed in your brother's room And you wrote me a letter and sent it the same afternoon You said "I just want to hurt myself Oh I need you so badly now" And you told me "Without you there seems to be no horizon at all Just no crack in the wall No place lower to fall "Hey don't leave me, don't leave me The shapelessness of the dawn Floods above and beneath me, I can't go on And I had to walk right into the trap And I had to say please come back Though I felt all the while My resistance slipping away Why did I have to fall for you Anyone else Wouldn't have hurt me Half As much as you