https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei4F31FAM-M

https://genius.com/Old-gray-like-blood-from-a-stone-lyrics

  1. In this poem is performed by is performed by William James for his friends who are a part of the band “Old Gray”.  Cameron Boucher, a friend to William James in “Old Gray” sought out William to assist in writing lyrics that would emphasize themes like depression, addiction, mental illness, and ultimately recovery.  Around 4:30am, much like a college student submitting a last minute remembered assignment, William texted the audio file to Cameron, “mistakes and all” from a hotel room in somewhere in Salt Lake City.  I find it interesting that I used to be able to know all of this from William’s website http://williamjamespoetry.com/ which has since removed the original post concerning the origin of the lyrics to this poetic song.  The recording quality was left untouched, unfixed, unedited from the raw recording completed at 4:30am, completed in “a state of exhaustion and no small amount of sadness.”
  2. This song/poem is filled with so many metaphors that I might as well just copy and paste the entire poem in this post, but don’t worry, I won’t do that.  There are so many metaphors and similes, the title itself is a simile that compares a human as a stone.  I wish I could include similes in this post but I will only highlight the metaphors, I highly recommend reading the entire poem on your own time.
    1.  “…unable to handle the ocean roar in your ears when you’re alone…”
    2. “…the girl with honeycomb and jasmine in her eyes…”
    3. “You dig in but something’s wrong, the fiber’s too gnarled and you can’t seem to cut clean. You push, hard as you can feel the stiff tangle of glue give way, and there’s blood on the floor…”
    4. “…all those ghosts reminding you of your destiny for failure…”
    5. “There’s a doctor with blank eyes…”
    6. “…her eyes are the most worried kindness you’ve ever seen and you go home
      And you fight off the ghosts, which is easier now than it was before, because now you have a better set of tools today, and your life goes on like it was meant to…”
    7. “And the smoke tendrils, once midnight black and swirling above your head, break away, leaving nothing in your view except the sky…”
  3. Many of these metaphors describe people, but many also describe feelings and physical states as well.  Quotes from line 2, 5, and 6 all describe a person with a metaphor.  Notice, “the girl” precedes the description that defines the color of her eyes, “…honeycomb and jasmine in her eyes…”.  “There’s a doctor” whose eyes are being described as “blank”, and in describing the feelings of a mother that are reflected in her facial expression, “are the most worried kindness you’ve ever seen…”  Metaphors used in 1, 4, and 7 all have metaphors in which they describe the feelings and thoughts of the rhetor/individual who is being spoken about in the poem.  “The ocean roar in your ears when you’re alone” could be describing the thoughts that some people hear when they are alone, some people hear endless thoughts that negatively impact their day to day lives that eat at their very being.  Example 4 discusses “those ghosts reminding you of your destiny for failure” which could be memories that the individual cannot get out of their head, they could be constant memories of past failures that the individual believes leads pattern to the future.  Line 7 discusses “the smoke tendrils” which were originally used to describe the girl at the beginning of the poem, but soon become a metaphor to describe the thoughts that cloud the individual.  The smoke, poor thoughts or memories, finally clears and the individual no longer feels “cloudy”, they feel relief and no longer bogged down from their past.  The “sky” could be an implied metaphor that compares to the future, the future that was once compared to a “destiny for failure” is now clear and free of negativity.  Line 3 is an implied metaphor concerning a comparison to how the individual is so emotionally disconnected or overwhelmed to the point where they believe that they are cutting open a box at work and fail to even realize, or acknowledge, that it is flesh and blood that they are cutting into and opening.  They also compare the human body, at that current state, to a monotonous object, a box in a stock room, when humans are so individualized and so alive.  The comparison could be that the individual is at the emotional state where they feel dead inside or as if they are a corpse walking.
  4. I believe that these metaphors highlight that there are states that people walk around in where they feel so out of touch or overloaded with their feelings that they lose touch with how they currently feel.  The poem goes through a story in which the individual goes through a zombie-like state after years of emotional drain and abuse until they almost cause the person in the poem to die.  However, the poem highlights recovery at the end.  The need to “fight off the ghosts” and to clear the future from the chaotic thoughts of whatever trials and tribulations that an individual may feel towards their mental/physical well-being.