SONG OF THE REVOLUTIONARY


1.
The car I drive is no limousine,
And I scrounge all day just for a porkchop.
Staying alive my # 1 goal.
I live above a butcher shop.

Everyday is Halloween for me, ever since I substituted
The slave I was, who’s now on parole, for the freelance revolutionary
Bum you see here, half-polluted and dressed for a more realistic parade,
One in which I play my own Fairy Godfather to the Self I’ve blessed
And dressed in robes of fade and suede.

Let Destiny lead me to my nest
And teach my legs to intervene
On the side of all oppressed
Bums like me who need a hole
To hide in an they live this jest.

2.
All day I hear the guillotine
Singing, humming. When will it stop?
Its nagging voice exacts its toll
In blood pressure, as I crawl and hop my way.

Since I was 17, I’ve seen the slave I was uprooted,
Cast into the wind to stroll and break, beneficiary
To the poverty of the persecuted peasant-slaves who masqueraded
As my parents, Margaret and Harry, who nursed me on a poisoned breast.
(That was folly. Let it fade.)

Let me drive the age-old pest
From out of this house and quarantine it
For 30 minutes, as in the West
The bloody sun sinks beyond the flag pole,
Nature’s Will to manifest.

3.
My hand glides over velveteen
Women, as fresh sunsets drop.
I yield myself to their control
(Or pretend to), as I reach the top
Of the bottom I’m hitting, unforeseen
And unforeseeably executed,
Clean as a bullet through a buttonhole.

Like you, I check the obituary column each morning to see who’s computed
The final sum, dead, underpaid,
And cut loose from this all-too-scary horror movie where we’re pressed
So hard we shriek our serenade.

All day, my nose goes mad, obsessed
With the smells of sex and Kerosene
And innocent victims under arrest.
Thursday nights, I try to bowl
The salad of my butchered quest.

4.
In their offices I’ve overseen
The mutilation and mopping up
Of what’s left of the human soul
After their con-game’s ruthless bop.

Stupidity, smelling of wintergreen and aftershave has prostituted
Itself to itself. And that’s the whole of the joke. And that’s why women marry
Men who swallow it undiluted.

Once I was a slave who played their suckers’ game , contemporary
And hollow as an empty chest.
But now I stand at the barricade they’ve erected to rob the dispossessed.
They can break my body like a figurine, but my mind might prove a harder conquest,
For I listen to the Deepest Oriole, singing the song they fear the best.

5.
Sisters and Brothers, this tambourine
I shake in your faces like a clergy-cop:
Forgive it...and my wish to scroll
Reality into an edible crop.

Once I was a slave in a submarine, just like you, electrocuted
By the taste of tuna casserole in a church basement on the lone prairie.
But life need not be convoluted, pressed and dried, if we invade
The kingdoms of vocabulary. Take care of your health. Get plenty of rest.
Trust your guts. Be not afraid. Free your hearts from their Budapest.
Dowse Tradition with gasoline. Here is my match for you whose stressed
Existence might be burnt to coal and then to diamond. Be my guest.

Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986