How Soon is Now?

Silver service sugar bowls and china cups in flood
Prints from brown fingertips and philosophies of blood
Children of the empire born and left to ride the tide
Of anger held at bay by force; the coin stood on its side

Heads that roll and tails that turn your name in to the thought police
Men that can’t see past the dotted line that marks their trouser crease
Wading in with sjambok law and the wrath of Calvin’s vengeful god
burning pages of what might have been tomorrows lightning rod

Diagonal lines on maps decreed to be your natural home
By stripes of any colour chosen, by shining teeth of chrome
words and will ‘tween thought and deed and the need to be released
from the weight all the blood and bone by arrogance deceased

And struggle blind to no avail in the net in which you’re caught
to wave your flag for the new country but that which you are taught
Will send you home in a plastic bag and eyes more cross than nought
Your afterlife as solid as the god for whom you fought

In the name of all that must be obeyed by you and me and Michael
But not by those who ride the gleaming one-trick unicycle
Spewing forth great gouts of cash to the applause of drooling nations
Who cannot find the piece of mind to change the fucking station

Flip the dial and cut the cord that holds you to the motherland
And standing on the haunted hill look back - perhaps to understand
That all you are, and want to be, cannot be held by arbitrary borders
And those who’d have you believe in all those invented mental disorders

That keep you chained to the remedy, the bitter pill of patriotism
That keeps you and me on either side of the cumbersome cultural schism
And promotes the manufactured need for laws that rely on the sales of gun
And keep us on the spiral course to the centre of the sun

So burn your flags for the wicker man and tomorrow’s cold sunrise
And raise your crystal glass to the Empire’s slow demise
For it is in the period of decline that we learn who we really are
And the light is shone on shadowed fruit once hid in a jar

Strange fruit that hangs from that fictitious tree of Adam’s original sin
Putrid waste of national pride best shed like leper skin
A weight undead but best well read to ward against the future
A race of men whose patchwork skin does not require a suture

To see that he is just like me in anguish and in laughter
And the only god to be revealed lives not in the hopeful hereafter
But here and now in this bitter slice, this razor edge of time
That calls us yet to lift ourselves out of the primordial slime

And stare back into the eyes that have us chasing fairy tails
to wipe the dust from the lens that bends and ultimately fails
to deliver us from the fabricated ethos of ‘this is what you need’
and walk the path that runs between the house of honourable thought…
…and the garden of ethical deed.

July 2007