Trying to hack this rap
As if I could rack up all my
thoughts in just one riff.
Still trip over my words with these flapping gums,
maybe ‘cuz the blunt ain’t done
And I’m fiending for another one,
but what’d I miss?
A verse so soft,
I could relive whatever it is
that lipsticked lips leave behind,
like a gentle kiss making me wish for a better time
when my mind was secure in its bliss,
not so quick to remiss,
or so swift to diss each thought as derelict crap.
Got that? ‘Cuz I didn’t. I’ll riff and still miss it.
Some flow got so much drow
You’d mistake it for a palindrome
still caught up searching for some meaning in the undertone.
Lost in my undertow.
Seeking a sea change, I rearranged
my life under a hail of endless tetris blocks,
wanting to rock somebody’s socks off
or prove that the whole world’s a crock.
Now, I’m just stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I’m in the caravan running on the fumes from tar sands,
and Iraqi oilways, far from grace, and yet still laced with rich veins;
We mine this land where justice leaves her own remains.
It’s over – we can’t sustain this limitless growth in select communities,
under lock and key, oh, tissue please, with stock issued priorities.
Hear them wonder: “Ah! What wars are lurking in my stock’s annuity?”
Here them ponder: “Ah! What’s so fucked about a neofeudal plutocracy?”
I can hear them mocking me. Me and my idealistic economic justice tendencies.
“Hey! How’s it feel to be a hippie hipster hip to our hypocrisies?”
I never thought there would be so few world leaders.
Or that the rich would need obedient good deeders.
I never thought great evil would be hiding in taxes.
I never knew how much destruction would be wrought by just plastics.
Paralyzed with hunger, I wonder, how to shop morally
as a concerned consumer when all of my groceries
are produced by fewer
than a dozen global companies
wringing out the juice like machines tuned
to consume at the rate of baby boomers.
Sooner or later, the temperature will
rise so fast it’s gonna surpass every ceiling and
steal the sky, leaving us all reeling
and kneeling in the dirt until we die.
And the next seven generations will forever ponder why.
So it goes, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, thank you very much,
all our grandchildren will smirk, ironic ’til you blush,
cold to the touch, blaming all their civilizational clashes
on the climate tipped off-balance, and hand us this stanza:
so it goes, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, thank you very much.
All our grandchildren’s children will work against the rush
of flash floods, where no looming levee will ever be quite enough,
And their only crutch will be the refrain
which circles down the drain,
along with all the leaves of this sordid history,
so it goes, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, thank you very much.