This is the story I'd been meaning to tell

To the novelist himself about how his book cast a spell

Though I never got a chance to and now Paul Auster's gone

Thirty years ago my journey'd only begun

University's blueprint for the literary lean

Studying Leviathan with teacher Maureen

Paired up with friendly fellow student named Fred

Only half aware of our innocence being shed

Raving about the author's genius and schemes

Bonding over the personal resonance of his themes

Though Fred vanished and we'd never meet again

Later he'd play a central role in my game

No recover from the reading's impact

No longer in thrall to someone else's ideal

Further education for tender hearts

Boy, a cornerstone's been in the making

Strange how it feels, strange how it feels

When no longer in thrall to someone else's ideal

Is this for real, is this for real, is this for real

Meeting a nice girl backstage after a gig

Her name was Nathalie and we soon shared a cig

Talking about books I lent her my original copy

Not fluent enough she passed it to her sister Gini

Then a dinner invitation which I could not refuse

Introduced me to the lady and let mystery diffuse

She mentioned someone she'd known from my hometown

Turned out to be none other than Fred, whose own copy of the book she'd turned down

While they briefly dated a few months before in a mental institution

And she was too heavily medicated then to actually focus on narrative fiction

The sheer ice breaker lured me upstairs to her room

The definitive clincher pulled us both up forever from the gloom

When the reigning spirit of chance collides with

Destiny's extraordinary feel

The sense of a kind of cosmic attraction

The pull of some inexorable appeal

A conjunction of dreams, bursting at the seams

A startling confluence of possible dreams

Yearning for real, turning to real, dreams have turned real