By the lake, we watch the day,
Grow old and die away,
And merge into the distance with the waves.
The sun goes down and leaves us there,
Watching us using empty sands,
For the strategies of careless ways.
Within a space of time,
Lovely with an essence’s grin,
We sit, dissipate, and die,
As time flies by like airplanes fly;
All within the flash of a pan.
Pages turned upon blank pages,
Of history we seek to conquer,
With weapons lost to weapons lost,
Immortality before Their love,
For the leaving of the one,
We love to see walk away.
The cat asleep on the windowsill,
Open to the sounds of midnight streets,
Sloping down to an imminent downslope,
Shoulders thin and twisting,
In the night between the bed sheets,
Twisted hearts enraged with death,
Looming in the closet;
All within, all within.
Us alone in the morning,
Rising from a lonely evening,
Spent in the arms of a mistake,
Sent from the capital before us,
Stupid as the year is a year,
And tired that we are still where we are,
As a year is still a year.
Smiling before the vacant cafe,
Smelling the noon-day traffic,
Screeching with pain from overbearing,
Cockroaches,
Lost amid the shining windows,
Cleaned with grease and vinegar;
Poured into our coffee.
Naked in the empty matinee,
Shouting at the screen to stop playing,
Giants watching us in our human,
Nature found in crooked seats,
Pressing against our heat-stroked sides,
Misting in the intermission;
All within, all within.
Snug inside an alien taxi,
Driven by a strange man whom we don’t know,
Chatting with a man whom we don’t know,
In another language that we don’t know,
Jangled music dancing from the tube,
Flashing sounds to us the few,
Who seek only to not care,
For foreign tongues who won’t take,
Enough to be the change we seek.
Stooping in the moisten alley smoking,
Single-packs of cigarettes,
Leaning against a plastic fire-escape,
Staring at the raccoons in the heater,
As kings with tickled noses,
Annoyed by pettiness below us,
Looking down upon the trash;
Of the earth we seek to forget.
Politicking to the politicians,
Talking about their stupid politics,
In the tax-run dump that we frequent,
Lying to their power-starved stomachs,
Aching for the sounds of support,
For the leader they wish to be,
Ebbed on by an insatiable wanting,
To be the middle finger of our hand;
All within, all within.
Drinking in the drunk bar downtown,
In the light within the night,
In the concrete part of town,
The ten-cent beers growing hazy.
Pretty drunk by the sundown,
Walking somewhere wherever we stop,
Falling in the rain washed gutter,
And laughing at the earth upon us,
Giving change to the vagabonds;
Preying upon the vigilantes.
Down by the lake, we are the day,
As we swim into the water,
And froth like fish in salt,
And leap into each other’s arms,
Slipping and splashing and sleeping,
With the air ripping before us.
On the sand we wake in the morning,
With crusted eyes and nowhere minds,
With hair all messed up in the back,
Dogs barking from the gates in the distance,
And gray skies apparent above us;
All within, all within.
We walk home with jackets draped,
Over swollen shoulders we rest our heads,
And pass the trashcans like haze in summer,
Concrete basil lost in Grandma’s salad,
Fed to the rats that will eat it;
And say high and ask them to stay;
All within, all within.
The change we make our last stand,
Like fire at the mouth of the Santa Ana rising,
We lie in the bed and watch,
The window grow pink with the dying sun,
In our arms with hands clenched grabbing skin,
And wait to do it all again;
All within, all within.
