1. |
Why and Whether
03:21
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'Why and Whether'
Why and whether wander wonder
Wishing for which one is always asking
If and then and for confusion
One is left to breathe into the night
For all the faces circle swirling
One might rhyme a song of common reason
Raddled by the reckless riddle
Ready for all restitutions come
Broken battered brothers sisters
Soliloquize in silence ever after
Made thick with sullen separation
Brick and mortar solitude to spare
Politicians preach and pander
Pushing at the picture present passing
In novelty one might not notice
The lesser evil’s lying none the less
The rise and retreat round rotation
Written like a law in common parlence
Cast up on the pages past
By the pen the signs with its own purpose
For all the fearless fellows fallen
Flanked from either side by those that follow
Who crushed by common courtesy
Collapse and call themselves the crazy fools
The screaming of the basic struggle
Set forth by the song of first action
All settled by the simple sound
Of silence when all civil servants sigh
Why and whether wander wonder
Wishing for which one is always asking
If and then and for confusion
One is left to breathe into the night
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2. |
Wheels Turn and Go
03:07
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'Wheels Turn and Go'
Gridlock caught in traffic, in roarin’ carbon smoke
Fifteen miles to work a day and fifteen miles back home
Criss-crossed through the country, like sick and pulsing veins
Where there once was farmland, a web of concrete lanes
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
Great wall of steel and concrete, to halt the river’s flow
To spin almighty turbines and power modern homes
It’ll flood the fertile valley with toxic algae fog
It will sit in quiet judgement when the salmon have all gone
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
In Athabasca, Canada, on stolen Native land
The earth is torn and blown apart in search of oil sands
Loaded on a truck bed, to the extraction plant it rolls
Leaving open wounds where a forest once did grow
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
Across a world a-crumblin’, through desert sands they roll
Machines of war push forward for the last remaining oil
And for every child screaming, a calculation’s made
The cost of thirty miles a day, six thousand miles away
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
Wheels turn, wheels turn and go
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3. |
Haymarket Square
04:18
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'Haymarket Square'
Workin’ men to strike, the union papers say
All work’s gonna stop on the first day of May
For an eight hour day, for their dignity
Well, thousands left their jobs and took to the street
For three days it was, I’ll tell you what then
On that third day the cops shot down two working men
So a rally was called, for that fallen pair
We’ll all gonna meet tomorrow out on the Haymarket Square
So they gathered around, and they gave their speech
Then the cops moved on in for to break up the peace
There was a flash of white light, and smoke everywhere
And the sound of gunshots rang out into the air
When the firing stopped, and the smoke had cleared
Four good men lay dead on the Haymarket Square
Eight were rounded up, but most were not there
Says you’re all under arrest for murder on the market square
In the courtroom of law, a lawless judge presides
With twelve vile jurors determined to take a life
Said say what you will, but your ideas are crime
So I’m gonna see you all out on the hangman’s line
They saw a better world
So they were hung in the air
And their silence hangs across all the Haymarket Square
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4. |
Down 'n Out
03:09
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'Down n’ Out'
I’m standing at the cross, streets main and fifth
I’m looking to the East, I’m looking to the west
But each way I been, and each way I go
It’s a poor man’s lot, to have a weary soul
[refrain]
I’m down n’ out, I’m down n’ out
I’m down n’ out, I’m down n’ out
I’m down n’ out, I’m down n’ out
I’m down n’ out, I’m down n’ out
I come for work, but I’m always late
The man says son, you just have to wait
But it never comes, just like it never does
And I’m still broke, just like I always was
[refrain]
So I’m preachin’ songs, I’m flying signs
I’m askin’ a dollar, but I’ll take your dime
Well it ain’t crime, I done no wrong
But the shopkeep says, boy move it along
[refrain]
So I hitch a ride, to another town
To another hope, for lettin’ me down
But sometimes I wonder, is there anywhere to go
Where all that money, ain’t spoken for
[refrain]
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5. |
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'Rising Fascism Talking Blues'
Banners fall to hand raised, swears
Red with all the blood it claims
In view of huddled masses
Who seek nothing but destruction
With the glory of a football game
A line is drawn, allegiance pledged
Against the faded faceless on the screen
Truth succumbs to mythology
The white man martyr, gun in hand
Redreams a fiction frontier
Pilgrims in a foreign land
Corrupted by complacency
To be cured in honest violence
‘Cause peace demands all order and destruction
The science of precision
Takes aim at foreign others
While the agents of hypocrisy
Point fingers, screaming horror
And demand with hollow wisdom
For the sake of all God’s kingdom
The machines of foreign war to come back home
Legislation of tribal rage
Draped in flags of honor
Will kill with cold injustice
Will tear children from their mothers
Will demand its full allegiance
And reward inhuman deeds
Afterall, there’s money to be made
Those that stand aside in horror
Who never saw what coming
Graduates of universities
With investments in the state of things
Calm in criticism
For they cannot understand
That hate corrupts the soul, but doesn’t lie
The refrain of modernity
This song’s been sung before us
By the poets and the refugees
Of the failing human heart
And it’s melody, it echoed
But it’s words were never heard
Through the sound of blazing trumpets in empty homes
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6. |
Night Terror Skiffle
03:19
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Night Terror Skiffle
Late at night when the sun was low
I jumped to stir but not to go
To ponder on a waking, passing thing
When down below, in the parceled ground
Sprung forth forward without a sound
The chatter of philosophers and peasants
A crashing from within the wall
Caused a force to cause to fall
Upon the floor where tiny creatures gathered
There upon to try to stand
Burdened by the weight of man
And the gravity of the moon in circulation
A swirling storm, and a gust of air
Pushed to wander on down the stairs
To find a war had all but broken out
Chimpanzees in coats of armor
Social arrangements and codes of honor
Swung sticks and stones and finely worded language
A battle of almost certain attrition
I leapt to flee out through the kitchen
And landed in the shadow of a king
Beyond the gallows where the prophets swing
Jesters mock and church bells ring
The mumble of a coal train was a-comin’
I took to hide in the garden bed
When sprung up forth to overhead
A silver clockwork ticking with exactness
And from the highest stories shout
Men in suits, words bleeding down
Said question not the tongue, itself made speaker
Then all around and through the haze
A perfect unconstructed maze
Pulsing with a dancing, toiling billions
And there the face of Galilei
And Dr. Martin Luther King
And every soul that’s ever stirred to askin’
But soon was passed and soon to follow
A child skipping on through a holler
Through no-man’s-land between two fallen nations
Through the laboratory where the atom split
Through the charred remains where the A-bomb hit
Tripped up the stairs to back where it had started
The story of this melody
And the moral as far as I can see
Is written on the brain just like a question
So before you done and turn to go
Well you done tell ‘em who sent you so
It was just the whisper of a long and restless night
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7. |
Massacre 2017
05:14
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'Massacre 2017'
*A song for Puerto Rico, to the tune of ‘1913 Massacre’ by Woody Guthrie*
The twentieth of September, two-thousand seventeen
The storm made landfall on an island country
It tore up the ground and it flattened their homes
With the force of a fate sealed one hundred years ago
A colony once, a colony always
The Spanish they left when the Americans came
Eight days of freedom then the cannonballs rang
The spoils of war, and a land kept in chains
Sugarcane first, then garment factories
Pharmaceutical production when regulations eased
One hundred year sweat shop for the land of the brave
But when the tax breaks stopped, all the jobs went away
The people in need, a recession set in
And so stepped forward their politicians
Who pleaded with Wall Street for loans they couldn’t pay
And with the stroke of a pen, signed the future away
The loans they defaulted as always they would
The corruptors got paid, but the banks wanted more
And the banks own the congress, so a racket was born
And so was created the Financial Control Board
Schools were shutdown and hospitals turned off
Homes were foreclosed and thousands laid off
The water and power are ready to be sold
All to the highest bidder offshore
When the winds hit the island, it was already too late
The coming disaster was well underway
They said sixty had perished, but that was a lie
When the numbers came in, nearly three-thousands died
La Promesa, the promise of complete misery
Of robbery, destruction, and austerity
That the many will have nothing, and the few will have all
And that the time is soon coming when the masters must fall
The first morning in May, two-thousand eighteen
The revolution started on an old San Juan street
In the hearts of the many, El Maestro survives
And calls to a people, Boricuas come unite
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Corey Andrew Iris Olympia, Washington
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