Simon and Garfunkel - Patterns

Collected Works / 1981-03-01 1. 7 o'clock News/Silent Night 2. AMERICA 3. Anji 4. April Come She Will 5. At the Zoo 6. A Most Peculiar Man 7. A Poem on the Underground Wall 8. A Simple Desultory Philippic 9. Baby Driver 10. Benedictus 11. Bleeker Street 12. Blessed 13. Bookends Theme 14. Bridge Over Troubled Water 15. Bye Bye Love 16. Cecilia 17. Cloudy 18. EL CONDOR PASA (IF I COULD) 19. Fakin' It 20. Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall 21. For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her 22. Go Tell It On The Mountain 23. Hazy Shade of Winter 24. He Was My Brother 25. Homeward Bound 26. I Am a Rock 27. Kathy's Song 28. Keep the Customer Satisfied 29. Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream 30. Leaves That Are Green 31. Old Friends 32. Overs 33. Patterns 34. Peggy-O (Traditonal) 35. Punky's Dilemma 36. Richard Cory 37. Save the Life of My Child 38. Scarborough Fair/Canticle 39. Somewhere They Can't Find Me 40. Song for the Asking 41. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright 42. Sparrow 43. The 59th Street Bridge Song 44. The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine 45. The Boxer 46. The Dangling Conversation 47. The Only Living Boy in New York 48. The Sound Of Silence 49. The Sun Is Burning 50. The Times They Are A-Changin' 51. Voices of Old People 52. We've Got a Groovy Thing Goin' 53. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. 54. Why Don't You Write Me 55. You Can Tell The World

Patterns

The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp
Paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Or a child's uneven scrawl.

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom.
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.

From the moment of my birth
To the instant of my death,
There are patterns I must follow
Just as I must breathe each breath.
Like a rat in a maze
The path before me lies,
And the pattern never alters
Until the rat dies.

And the pattern still remains
On the wall where darkness fell,
And it's fitting that it should,
For in darkness I must dwell.
Like the color of my skin,
Or the day that I grow old,
My life is made of patterns
That can scarcely be controlled.