Song

Gun

Astrid Williamson · 2022

Included on:
Into The Mountain

If I were to begin in the middle, I might say There’s a bridge you will cross
Which leads to the end of your life
But who ever knows the exact second Into which they are born

Time, sinuate, slithering hours into days, days into years Uncoils recklessly into all my wasted moments, Engulfing the reach for certainty
The striving for something like truth

And I’ve spent my life trying to hear this song Buried with, and wedded to desire
Shrouded by subjugation and rejection,
I now yield to the futility

Of trying to learn the song of my own heart
It’s strains woven with truth but as incoherent as bees Spiralling down,
Infinite as the windings on a periwinkle’s back
Felt in the body
The little hairs rising up on my arms

And standing sentinel to all things is memory
Where we are at once imprisoned and liberated
It’s loss the drain into oblivion
I’m losing my own mother and I ask myself
Where have you gone Mam?
As I wish you into the arms of gentle Jesus
All the while absconding from the crushing guilt I carry in my own Surrendering to the velocity of life again and again
Reeling like Goldmund between lust and despair
Hungry for peace and cessation,
For the tranquil waters

But the waters are heaving with a leviathan
Essential rhythm giving way to automation
Hypnotised by machines
Hyper-muscular test tube dogs and weaponised super humans
Are created and absolved
No dead man’s switch, no dreams of electric sheep
The unceremonious knife-at-your-throat black-operative
Thought too explicit for our sanitised visions of death
And continents away
Many degrees separated from our acts,
We sit collectively, indifferently
Unaware that this dissociation
Is the last refuge of our dying soul

But in this small moment into which I am now born
Trying to see the world through the eyes of God’s avatar
I’m not proud, I seek only relief
From the cold burning my cheek,
The bright wind biting and drawing me inescapably towards myself
The salt stinging ice clad waves of November
Making hand holding impossible
And my heart grieves for that unusually sunny day spent indoors
And I realise
I’ve simply come back to where I began

But secretly, secretly
I’m still banging my drum
So keep from me, keep from me
A pill, a blade or a gun
Yeah secretly, secretly, yeah
I’m still banging my drum
You better keep from me, keep from me
A pill, a blade or a gun
A pill, a blade or a gun
Keep from me, keep from me, your gun
But Secretly, secretly,
I’m still banging my drum
You better keep from me, keep from me
A pill, a blade or a gun
Secretly, secretly
I’m still banging my drum