Voice of the Ancetral Shrew - Ron Perrone

I wrote the poem to this my final year in college (1990) but didn't put it to music until a few years later when, after an accident with a log splitter left me without a functional thumb for a month, I had to do SOMETHING with only 1 hand.  It was inspired by the frustratingly simple-minded attitudes of many of my fellow students at WVU. The quote that set me off was a coversation that went something like this.

Environmentalist, "You can't do that, its just WRONG!"
Business Major, "But its legal!".
Environmetalist, "But its immoral!"
Business Major, "But, its legal."

(With a nod to King Crimson)



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Lyrics

My dear Cenozoic chidren
Iit seems to that lately, you' have been sleeping the day down
Are you doing the right thing?
Or are you merely getting stoned off the smoke
Of a blazing empire in decline

But I see that you have been counting the lights
In the midnight concrete sky
Those retinal flares that mark
The accepted and civilized choice
For synaptic self-immolation

I rust that you have been evading the autoclave law
And its attendant reptilian  bites on the scalp and throat
As for myself, well I have been hiding
In a grey crevasse, transcendant
On a landscape that is immutable
A habitat safe for cows

In the starless and bible black of contemporary annonimity
It would serve you well to seek out those crepuscular haunts
For the last tangled ring of ageless limbs and roots
For there stands the Old Guard, though weary and ax-bitten
They are still holding the high ground
Holding the clean sweet earth
And awaiting the onslaught finale

For this is an honorable place
As any to which you may aspire
When migration ends on a landscape rendered sterile
Safe now for cows and for swine
All basking and lowing
Ah, sleek and unknowing
Huddled in their thousand points of precious light