"But the writing is on the wall!"
Cried the fresh cut to the old wound, still bleeding
As if he didn't know
As if he hadn't done his fair share of reading
Like he'd never felt the flames of revolution
The young man's simple solution
Peter out time and time again
Like he never spotted revolution's hole before the end
And the writing on the wall? that impotent echo of inertia unmasked
The writing on the wall that really matters
Is in the Jewish quarter under bulletproof glass
It holds a lost family's past the top
Will fight to be forgotten
This whole fucking city's rotten to the core
But it's you, and it's me
It's the woman, heavy with child
Screaming "please!" from the doorway
She clutches her belly as triage sets in
When the night street sweeper
Lets her choose which one of her children...
It's the jacked up jackboot, with his foot
On the neck of the pale girl, the frail girl
Dimming the light in the only eyes bright enough
To see a pattern through the cracks
This lonely boy, chewed up and swallowed
By streets, spit, famine, and rats
It's the words of the last librarian,
The only man among us
With enough courage and true grit
To save our knowledge from the fires we lit
When he burst, arms full, from the blaze
One proud voice in the panic,
He called out:
"Son, if you're going to cry, then cry havoc!"
It's the neighbourhood pill pusher, a family man
It's our weakness, it's our strength
We are the very fingertips of life's outstretched hand
But you'll find no spark in the sandstone dark
Because what the holy men won't preach
Is that the one thing that unites us
Is reach
We reach forward
And there aren't enough songs in the world
Not enough words in my tongue, nor enough breath in my lungs
There is no echo that has lasted so long
No shadow that has stretched so far as we
We reach forward
And it's safe hands back down the line
In the endless chain
Not lost, never lost, when the strength
That we gained from their giving remains
We reach for the echo
We reach forward
For the moment between waking and sleep
For the sum not some of us
Together we leap
And yet we eat enough stone
That hard hearts hide a home
Under promise, understanding
Under children's skin and bone
And the writing on the wall you love
Was hand-penned by the censor
So spit in the cannon's mouth
And tell 'em ink sent ya!
