Borders
Lyric
The borders of your mind are closing in,
Contracted by the sites that expose you to old sins.
Like the boxes on the Rhine
Thoughts are empty, hearts are hard.
There’s no pride,
For the lions on my chest.
The people in this green and pleasant mess,
Seem so foreign to my senses,
I’m defenceless to their wish.
Why does your heart swell for your country?
An accident of where you were born.
What makes this rock seem so special?
As you bask in the glory of those before.
Einstein may have lacked a certain charm,
But he knew, that the borders cause such harm.
Murder in the name of country,
Isn’t just some war of words.
The borders,
Of my country pen me in.
And the irony can’t be lost on anyone.
The more you push me further,
The harder it is to walk away.
Story
Again, a recent song that originally came from mucking about with an A major 7th and a weird E minor fingering that I thought sounded very loungey at first and tumbled together really quickly.
I used to sleep in the room at a friend’s house whose son had long since moved out but left this striking poster of an Einstein quotation where he absolutely tore into people who were willing to fight for their country.
It had long made me think about how we blindly love our country which is weird when it’s just an accident of birth. When I said this to Dave he immediately said – that’s a lyric! And so it became.
I would quite happily see the end of nation states, but the same friend whose son’s room I would use said that we always find a way of falling into local tribes and there’s a comfort from it. I see his point, but would love to see people stop waging war over each other and hating each other just because of where they happen to be born.