Someone
Someone
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Someone
Someone came to me
I was tired of attending today
Someone whispered to me
I have years to go without you
Someone looked at me confronting my fears
Someone reminded me of your name
that's why your presence still lingers on
Someone touched me, a proxy from you
But time recoils & bounces, it never erases, just flexible.
Someone held me, it had your signature squeeze
Captivating me
Someone let me go as you usually do
You had all of me still & faces chased all hope for longing
It’s another day for passersby to share
what i already know
I see someone coming to me
my kind of scene all over again
Let’s begin with you
You had all of me in everyone that came to me
They were your angel’s hands
holding sanity process in check
I’ll hold on just to say i held you once
For the sake of the euphoria
Of seeing you again
Someone will find my body
floating In the muddy waters at wave break
At the daily ritual spot, expired.
Someone is bound to tell you to let me go
& enshrine me in the halls of the lonely holy
but the last part never happens
i always attend tomorrow
tomorrow becomes today
and someone always comes to me
and someone whispers to me
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lyrics & vocals : azdi404
music credit: Fall - apc beats 2023
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This poem, “Someone,” reads as an elegy caught between haunting repetition and quiet resignation—a meditation on grief, memory, and the cyclical persistence of love long after its loss. It belongs thematically with the previous poems about Laly but takes a darker, more existential turn: the speaker now seems to exist in a liminal state between life and death, between holding on and letting go.
Here, “Someone” becomes both literal and symbolic: it is the presence that keeps returning, the embodiment of absence itself—a proxy for the beloved who is gone, and for the human tendency to reanimate memory as substitute for the living person.
I. Central Themes
1. The Persistence of Memory
The poem opens with a sequence of haunting intrusions:
“Someone came to me / … Someone whispered to me / … Someone reminded me of your name.”
The repetition of “Someone” creates a rhythmic, almost ghostly presence—a refrain that mimics the obsessive recurrence of memory. Each “someone” is a manifestation of the absent beloved, a reflection of the speaker’s inability to forget.
The phrase “I have years to go without you” conveys both endurance and despair: time stretches endlessly forward, but without healing. Memory doesn’t fade; it “recoils & bounces”—elastic, not erasing, always returning.
2. Substitution and Haunting
The poem’s emotional core lies in its exploration of surrogate presences—others who momentarily evoke the beloved.
“Someone touched me, a proxy from you.”
“Someone held me, it had your signature squeeze.”
Each encounter is filtered through the memory of the lost love. Every touch, every voice becomes a reincarnation of the original, but also a cruel reminder of what can never return. The word “proxy” perfectly encapsulates this duality—standing in for, but never being, the real presence.
This constant substitution suggests that the speaker lives in the echo of love, unable to engage authentically with new connections. Every “someone” collapses into the same “you.”
3. Time, Repetition, and Ritual
Time in this poem is circular rather than linear. The repeated structure—“Someone came to me … Someone whispered to me”—forms a loop, mirroring the endless recurrence of memory and grief.
“Tomorrow becomes today / and someone always comes to me / and someone whispers to me.”
This cyclical motion echoes the psychological experience of mourning: every day begins with the illusion of renewal, but always returns to the same ache. The act of remembering becomes ritualistic—a “daily ritual spot” where grief is enacted again and again.
4. Death and Transcendence
In one of the poem’s most striking and unsettling turns, the speaker imagines his own death:
“Someone will find my body / floating in the muddy waters at wave break.”
This image is both literal and symbolic—a vision of surrender, of the self dissolving into the same temporal waters that have carried memory forward. Yet even this imagined death does not release him from the cycle:
“But the last part never happens / I always attend tomorrow.”
The speaker is trapped in a purgatory of recurrence. Death offers no closure, because remembrance itself keeps resurrecting him. The eternal return of “someone” ensures that grief—and the self defined by it—never ends.
II. Imagery and Symbolism
| Image / Motif | Symbolic Meaning |
|---|---|
| “Someone” | A shifting embodiment of absence; the ghost of the beloved reappearing in others. |
| Touch and “signature squeeze” | Memory stored in the body; the physical trace of lost intimacy. |
| “Muddy waters at wave break” | Death, dissolution, and the merging of body and nature; echoes of baptism and burial. |
| “Daily ritual spot” | The repetition of mourning; grief as habitual devotion. |
| “Halls of the lonely holy” | The sanctification of loss; the transformation of love into sacred loneliness. |
The muddy waters recall ancient and religious imagery—baptism, purification, the River Styx—suggesting that death here is not merely end but passage. Yet the speaker never crosses fully over; he remains trapped in the liminal “wave break,” neither submerged nor saved.
III. Structure and Form
The poem’s structure mirrors its thematic content:
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Free verse gives the language natural, almost conversational rhythm.
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The repetition of “Someone” acts as refrain—like a tolling bell, marking time and emotional recurrence.
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The progression from presence to imagined death and back to repetition creates a circular narrative; there is no true ending, reinforcing the sense of eternal haunting.
The diction is plain, yet emotionally loaded—words like “proxy,” “recoils,” “expired,” “ritual” evoke an existential weariness beneath the simplicity.
IV. Tone and Voice
The tone oscillates between resignation, quiet awe, and despair. There is no overt dramatization of grief; instead, the poem’s restraint gives it haunting power.
By the final stanza, the voice has become spectral, detached—a consciousness aware of its own entrapment in mourning. The repetition of “someone” becomes almost incantatory, blurring the boundaries between prayer and lament.
V. Interpretation
“Someone” dramatizes the aftermath of profound loss—not the moment of heartbreak, but the long echo that follows. The speaker lives in a world of substitutes, where every new encounter triggers an old memory. Time cannot cleanse him, and even the fantasy of death offers no release.
In its final loop—
“Tomorrow becomes today / and someone always comes to me / and someone whispers to me.”
—the poem closes not with resolution but with the reassertion of endless recurrence. The act of remembering itself becomes the afterlife: the speaker survives only as the echo of his own mourning.
VI. Thematic Continuity (Context within the Laly Cycle)
Within the larger body of poems (“Kissing a Saint,” “Laly’s Birthday,” “The Offering,” and now “Someone”), this piece functions as the coda—the ghostly aftermath of devotion.
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In “Kissing a Saint,” love was divine.
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In “Laly’s Birthday,” love became distant but alive in memory.
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In “The Offering,” love was entombed in art.
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In “Someone,” even art cannot contain it; the memory itself becomes a haunting presence that eternally renews itself.
The beloved has become diffuse, spread across time and other people, while the poet dissolves into repetition and ritual. What remains is a haunting cycle of remembrance—love transformed into eternal recurrence.
VII. Closing Reflection
“Someone will find my body … / Someone is bound to tell you to let me go / & enshrine me in the halls of the lonely holy.”
The poem’s final irony lies in the line that follows:
“But the last part never happens.”
Even in death—or the fantasy of it—the speaker cannot be released. Love, memory, and language have conspired to keep him in perpetual motion: a ghost attending his own tomorrow.
“Someone” thus reads as both elegy and reincarnation: an exploration of how love’s echo endures beyond the grave, how absence becomes its own form of immortality.
Would you like me to craft a synthesized analysis of all four poems—reading them as a complete narrative cycle tracing the evolution of love from sanctity to haunting, or even as a “Laly Quartet”? It would reveal the progression of tone, imagery, and the transformation of the speaker’s relationship with divinity, art, and death.
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