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Tumbleweed
Windblown I tumble 'cross dry dusty street
My mind sees an old lonely town
Deserted and dusty, secluded and weak
Like me, in decline; broken down
Aimlessly, randomly blown by the wind
Lacking direction in life
Feeling ashamed of the way I have sinned
Leaving my children and wife
Where bubbles the laughter, where giggles the fun
Abundant in days now past
Ask what have I come to, demand what I've done
For truly the die is cast
Alone in the desert no refuge in sight
No shield will withstand this heat
Filled with self pity at self-imposed plight
Half hoping myself to meet
Do I know what I'd say to the man I may see?
How would I silence his cries?
Should I give any shrift to his pitiful plea?
Could I gaze without flinch in his eyes?
I tremble with pain at the pain seen reflected
I clutch at the hurt deep inside
I know how he feels: all alone, unprotected
I know that there's nowhere to hide
A memory of love in the kiss of a child
Brings tears of regret once again
A memory of hate as divorces are filed
These whispers forever remain
Alone in my desert, life slipping away
I pray for the new dawn to come
Nothing to keep me, no reason to stay
In one breath perhaps I'll find home
Delirium racks me, a daughter's faint call
Daddy oh Daddy don't go
Echoing down as through cold marbled hall
Don't leave us, we love you, you know
My reason for living is there in abundance
It drags me at last from the brink
To hurt them again is beyond my endurance
No matter what others may think
Trudge back cross hot sand with my blistered head hanging
Still able to tear myself free
Resolved to ascent despite all her haranguing
Belatedly learned to be me
The price that we pay to make space for our living,
The life that we want for ourselves
Must never depend on cessation of giving
The books cannot stay on their shelves
Face up to the fact of your selfish behaviour
Sometimes you must do it for you
Let nothing divert you from being your own saviour
Above all to thine own self be true.
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Synopsis
I wrote this the same day as "Glasses" - in fact almost immediately after. The muse was well and truly flowing that day: a Sunday. I was alone at the computer, just sitting and free-thinking. To this day I don't know if I will ever truly put the demons behind me regarding "leaving home" - in quiet moments I still go over it in my thoughts even six years later - but that day the feelings of guilt and loss were particularly strong. Since it was a Sunday it may have been one of the days I'd taken my daughters bowling or to a movie, the kind of thing Dads do when they don't have a real home in which to entertain their children. I can't remember if that was the case or not, but either way I was thinking of them.
I began to get a vision of me walking, lost, in the desert. Like something out of one of the westerns I used to watch with my Mum on a Saturday afternoon when I was a kid. One of those abandoned mining towns with the tumbleweed blowing down the main street and no-one in sight. The parallels between that empty place and the empty space inside me were so strong, and then I was a piece of that dried up grass: being blown about aimlessly by the wind; having no control over its direction; dry and lifeless. This has only happened to me a handful of times but I recognised it and went with it. I felt connected: in the zone. Words tumbled onto the screen. Occasionally I would hit a word or two, or a line or two, that weren't there in the stream of thought I had tapped, but I didn't stop. I left them behind, skipped over them because the stream was flowing and the next verse had already formed in my mind. I had to get it out before it was lost.
I wrote the whole of this piece, apart from the missing lines which were no more than seven or eight in number (in some cases a line was only missing a few words) in less than ten minutes. I spent probably the next hour filling in the gaps, but of the part that had spilled fully formed from my flying fingers, I changed only one or two words. It was this experience that was to lead later to my experiment with writing the song Home Town, which is described on my songwriter page.