Crossing The Water

This is a more introspective song than I initially thought would go on Head Canon - about wrestling with the need for self-care as we tiptoe towards the end of the world. I’m asking myself where taking time for yourself ends and fiddling while Rome burns begins.

I also want to doff my cap to Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou for the springboard into verse 2 from his sublime words in The Dryness And The Rain:

“A fish swims in the sea
While the sea is in a certain sense
Contained within the fish!
Oh, what am I to think
What the writing
Of a thousand lifetimes
Could not explain
If all the forest trees were pens
And all the oceans - ink?”

I learned to sleep alone, my back to the wall
To murmur there unheard against the rise and the fall
A shadow on the breath, all these fits and starts
A ghost in the machine - you made a man with all moving parts
Symptoms undiagnosed, a body under stress
Evidence new disclosed and a case that I make under duress
I worry that night will fall before I find my way home

Bombs falling in the night turned my ribs to coal
Dreams of balances, feather for a soul
You read me like a book and I start to think
That my skin’s turned to paper and my blood to ink
Words run down the page, make the margins black
A weight off your shoulders and a metaphor that’s breaking my back
I worry that night will fall and all that I’ve built will be gone

Go find a hill before the flood comes
You show your fear, I’ll show you dust
What little I can hold in these arms
Is all that I will carry with me

I learned to sleep alone, my back to the wall
To murmur there unheard against the rise and the fall
Now the wind’s picking up - a storm in my throat
If no man is an island then keep me afloat
And tie me to the mast, I’ll pilot these straits
I hope it’s true what you said: that they also serve who stand and wait
I know that the dawn will break and all this will be said and done

© T Ashworth 2018