Wake Up and Scream

We speak of secret weapons yet secrets themselves
Carried close to the breast are both simplest and best
As the most potent weapons life has on its shelves
If you can keep secrets you can keep all the rest

My father was the one who kept the secrets and
Kept them better than anybody I have known
As casual as the gun beneath his pillow
As much a part of him as the gun in his hand
He traded for a silent deathbed all alone
And (although I do not want to) I understand

He left this world knowing things are not as they seem
Because of people like him and of what they do
Which must have seemed still stranger to him than to me
As well as his last wife (the one I never knew)
When after his silence and the thought of it he
Died with his nightmares as I was trying to dream

Knowing only shadows of the secrets he knew
Some stories of former lives from some former wives
(Although not from my mother who would never say
One way or the other since she was my mother)
I remain secretly proud of his derring-do
His swash of the buckle and all that sort of thing
From a gun for hire to the keeper of a king

If they wanted it done my father was the one
To pull the trigger or make bad things happen but
Then he turns out to have this poet for a son
Although I was a secret and nobody knew
Except for him except for me one life for two

Looking back I can see how his friends kept an eye
On my result of his youthful indiscretion
Dark men in dark clothing at dark hours of the night
Presents of his absence to watch (no matter what)
The son of an oak grow up to be a willow

Alone as he was on the knife of madness I
Can see how he was wrong now yet how he was right
But I wish he had told me life would be this way
His love was denial as mine is confession
My father is a secret his son cannot keep

Still waters run red and deadly as well as deep
His nightmares are mine now as I wake up and scream

+Steven Curtis Lance



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