“All they lack is experience of something other than themselves…”

Day Four of The Challenge: we get a wee bit protesty.

Secret Life

Black death creeps across the streets
Teen girls cover their mouths as the boybands sing
Eulogies to their prepackaged hells
All they lack is experience of something other than themselves

Every surface stained with perfection’s lie
Women starve themselves to fit the ever narrowing eye
And seeking to avoid their karmic pain
The insured pop pills to feel good and act all the same
(forget your prayers and rewire your brain)

Poor man’s cardboard reads: “SPARE SOME CHANGE”
Rich man’s lawn littered with politician’s names
And that eruption on Capitol Hill
Ain’t terrorism but expansion of the shareholder’s will
(All hail the Almighty Dollar Bill)

And those who’d spend their lives in protest
Often end up seeing only what the most detest
And if belief becomes a man’s definition
I’ll put my faith not in defiance, but rather invention

So hush my dear that none of this will touch you
Allow the bitter skin to open up upon the sweet fruit
And if you search beyond the evident Joys & Ills
I promise you, you will find
The secret life that fulfills.

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“As if you needed to correct some small accident…”

Day Three of The MayDayChallenge: a troublesome duet sung by two strangers in a double bed.

Napalm and Cake

Yesterday,
with a tumult in her eye
She tried kissin’ me, and I don’t know rightly why
But I’m about to be
Caught up in the storm, she brews next to me

Keeping my body warm
In this double bed
That perhaps from too much drink
I had let her in
And I can’t allow her to think
She’s got the upper hand

But I can’t recall her name, and she’s lyin’ on
My arm that’s half asleep,
And my knighted pawn
Moves to the words she speaks
In the morning light
Her skin a sheath of down, and her heavy sighs
The wind before the storm that she clarifies:

“Yesturday,
When I saw you standin’ there at the dim-lit bar
With your wild, unkempt hair
Your eyes seemin’ far
As though set on something wrong
In a distant land
And I could tell your will was strong
In your heart & hands
As though you needed to correct
Some small accident
And if I would interject
myself in your plans
You’d change my insides for the better,
Here…”

And she moved her hand astride
My listenin’ ear
And she moved her body high
On my body, and
We unmade the day with that gruesome act
Of napalm and cake
And her hurricane
It scooped the dirt from my guts,
The scum from my brain
And for a moment we were one
And all but the same