Song of Providence

Running scrambled and naked down the cracked sidewalk.

The moon sets behind the sun

As my heart squeezes up my throat and out my mouth and nose.

The river carries trash down the street

While a child with no father issues a petition from an apartment window.

    A petition against God, fate and the government.

    A demand for a life he can't have.

 

Tenements, pseudo-Victorian two-families, smear across the hillside

    And march west on the backs of construction workers,

    Clawing down towards the people in the street

        Who trip and stumble thirsty and out of breath towards fleeing Friday.

 

Meanwhile, in college dorms,

The freshest wave of hippies and "chipe motherfuckers"

    Immortalised and demoralised by Mr. Heron

Plots the latest revolution as funded by their parents' salaries

    While a bank stuffs their childhood home into its pocket

And gets ground along the four-year conveyor belt,

Waiting to be spit into the street

Looking for jobs in top-floor corner offices

In cities where all the buildings are cylinders of concrete.

 

They put their picket signs in front of the faces of their peers

    Who are too busy giving shelter to the bums in the square

    And drafting legislation that has a home waiting for it up the ass of the establishment;

        The establishment with its conventional wisdom and its powers that be:

            The power of green.

    Their peers who are too busy to join in on the party.

 

Any party,

Be it one fuelled by cheap liquor,

    Misunderstood, mistreated Mary Jane

    And hot chicks who dig Chomsky

Or by the furious jerking off of big-banking bastards

    Fond of getting fondled by silk-suited CEOs

    In the name of a conveniently greedy god

        Who's cool with billion-dollar bonuses

        But will damn me to dolorous decades if I as much as dream of getting down and dirty

        With another dude.

 

Now to those of you working Habitat for Humanity,

Feeding Rwandan refugees,

Getting school books to broken communities

Because mankind burns in your heart

And you want to serve your capital G-O-D

I mean no disrespect.

 

I may not believe, but plainly I can perceive

That your good deeds help carry us forward on our human trek.

 

But you deserve to know what you are standing for

When you sign your names next to those of this human drek;

    When you sign over your name and your soul and your brain with a felt pen's black check.

 

To anyone out there on this lonely blue ball,

Reading or listening to this diatribe

Alone or with someone by your side,

I challenge you to take my message not to the convenience store owner trying to pay

    His daughter's way through school.

 

Take it to the top.

Take it to the "chipe motherfucker".

Take it to the twisted twits in their Washington offices with hundred dollar bills for wallpaper.

 

When they stomp on your balls

And ask "Who are you to make these claims?"

Tell them "I sign my name 'Humanity' 

And I've come for your head and my dreams!"