I’ve spent time with my hands on the fortune

Of others, spending time, chasing trifles

While, all the while truth sang, with distortion

Our lies were in the red, where blood stifles

The outpourings of joy, the mystery

Of life, its topsy-turvy eyefuls

Of feeling and flesh; healing history

And hate fueling progress and opulence

While, all the while there’re deaths from dysentery

While I’d give all I’ve left for somnolence

For the gift of dreaming, I’d give my heart

Gift-wrapped, in fact, in the very violence

That made it stop in time, via the art

That made me, that taught us how to deceive

And how to make poverty seem so smart

That it didn’t oppress us or relieve

The necessity of beauty, of art

Of honesty without truce or reprieve

The only truth grave enough to impart

To impact, to change the chains of foul thoughts,

Evil dreams and self-defeating steel darts

Poisoned at the tip, rotten at the source,

Is the truth of time, the path toward nothing?

This is the only way out of the box

And yet we must stay here and give something,

We must push forward toward what life concocts

Even if that leads us to no known thing

And others pass us by in fleeting flocks

Their magic isn’t real; it’s just a show

You fly, we fly on the winds that like rocks

Can smash or crush or ground or shine and glow

Or skip upon waters that help us flow.