by shaun lawton
Get it down help it across step it up move like water
Fork it over hand it under don't let your dreams be torn asunder
Stand up to it look right at it straight in the eye state it over and over
I won't back down again and again no I won't back down my friend
My wife my son my brother my sister my mother my father's ghost
My wife my neighbor my coworkers and boss my fellow strangers
No one will ever get out alive and we each face the reaper alone
We're all in it a part of the whole, each individual cell a colony
With our roles to play along in this building symphony of song.
A chorus rising and falling through outer space that ebbs and flows
Along without a trace of evidence left in its wake except for the twinkling
stars strewn forward and back in a grand celestial swarming of birth
and death echoing forth in lengthening radio waves of fading reception
while we gaze in a direction we mistake as outward, oblivious
to our place in the expanding branes of creation, to be recycled
into the permanent installation we might think of as the artifice
of articulation, the ultimate portrait reflection shading the emerging
contour of a face beyond the scope of our capacity to receive it all
with the singular exception of a second guessed fate like
the wavering image cast back from the surface of a rippling lake
that catches our attention to arrest us in place on a split mind trip
of objectification magnifying our individual egos out of proportion
from the whole until we confuse ourselves with the dream of god
under the constant tides of awakening while legion fall back into sleep.
.jpg)
