Inertia And The Weapon Of The Wall

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 you!