Reprieve

(thanks to jessica and anna)

Manhattan is an island

Like the women who are

Surrounded by children in the car

Surrounded by cars

Or manhattan was a project

That projected the worst of mankind

First one and then the other

Has made its mark on my mind

It's sixty years later near the hypo-center of the a-bomb

I'm standing in the middle of hiroshima

Watching a twisted old eucalyptus tree wave

One of the very few lives that survived and lives on

Remembering the day it was suddenly thousands of degrees

In the

Shade

And what all of nature gave birth to

Terror took in a blinding raid

With the kind of pain

It would take cancer so many years just to say

Oh to grow up gagged and blindfolded

A great big mans world in your little girls head

The voice of the great mother drowned out

In the constant honking haunting the accident scene up ahead

Oh to grow up hypnotized and then try to shake yourself awake

Cause you can sense what has been lost

Cause you can sense what is at stake

Yeah it took me a few years to catch on that those days i catch everyone's eye

Correspond with those nights of the month when the moon gleans like an egg in the sky

And men are using a sense they don't even know they have just to watch me walk by

And me, i'm supposed to be sensible, leave my animal outside to cry

But when all of nature conspires to make me her glorious whore

It's cause in my body i hold the secret recipe of precisely what life is for

And the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it is the same one making war and i've said too much already but i'll tell you something more

To split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do so girl if that shit ain't up to you, then you simply are not free cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs i grow to term

To the expression that i wear, all i really own is me

I mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do

Goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve and in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age

Feminism ain't about equality, it's about reprieve