Birdcage

I wanna choke out the pain of your past

I wanna suck out the poison they kept feeding you

I wanna undo the lies they all told you

Make them honest, or make them gone

I'm gonna rattle your birdcage to wake you up

And prove to you, you're not done yet

I'm gonna open your birdcage and wait for you

To see that I'm not like all the rest

I wanna squeeze every ounce of mistrust in your heart

Every doubt that throws shadows on my love for you

Here's some amnesia, so you can live and love again

Only good memories from now on

I'm gonna rattle your birdcage to wake you up

And prove to you, you're not done yet

I'm gonna open your birdcage and wait for you

To see that I'm not like all the rest

And I could never hurt you

And I'll never leave you

I wanna be the one that heals you

I wanna be the one that sets you free

And when the truth of my love comes over you

You'll open up your wings, and fly out

And that little songbird that lives in your heart

Will finally be singing our song

I'm gonna rattle your birdcage to wake you up

And prove to you, you're not done yet

I'm gonna open your birdcage and wait for you

To see that I'm not like all the rest

Fred and I were both at a point in our lives where we had kind of given up on ourselves. We can all get to that place where, no matter how hard we try, things never seem to change for the better.

I had been learning a lot about trauma and the words of our second song, Birdcage, was my take on how it felt to watch someone else being stuck in trauma. How you can get almost violently frustrated with what happened to them. You want to help them retaliate, but the situation is passed, and is in the past. Sometimes the people who hurt them are long gone, but the damage and scars remain and take their toll on the victim.

The idea of rattling the birdcage is to wake them up from the spell of their inner thoughts and feelings. They need to be jolted into the here and now, somehow. And the opening of the birdcage is the opportunity for the traumatized person to finally feel free to live. And only by learning to trust just one other person, the spell can be broken, and a brand new life can be born.

Image by Ivan Zalazar from Pixabay