Lee Bains + The Glory Fires

1. BREAKING IT DOWN!

The sanctuary inhaled Ibrahim’s quiet
Intercession
For Palestine’s displaced, detained and dead.
Through teachers’ gasps, the plea took wing
To the rafters,
Its echo settling onto our stooped small heads,
    And arced over the rough gray blocks
    To the cell that held Dr. King.
    The doors swung open,
    And the bell did ring.
        All the children, breaking it down.
        Come on, children. Break it down.

Inside a vine-eaten warehouse,
Under rust-soured towers,
Distorted truth buzzing through a busted P.A.,
Sons and daughters of bankers and farmers,
Miners and lawyers,
Eyes shut and hollering, hips all asway
    In sweating hope, clinging to each other
    Like flesh to the bone,
    That they’ll be able to rise up and walk
Without having to leave home.
    All the children, breaking it down.
    Come on, children. Break it down.

Crowned with a chain of wildflowers
Plucked from midfield,
He stands among sunlit pillars of gnats.
And, draped in the jake-brake chattering of I-20,
He twists his jersey up around his narrow white chest,
And throws his shaggy head back.
And the rowdy counsel of laughing black boys
Clap and shout:
“Cotton candy, sweet as gold!”
He rolls his hips and grins wildly,
As the other team, from over the mountain,
Points and sneers and spits and moves in close.
    But, like a vision, the host draws round about him,
    Arms like wings, voice like trumpets, Rasheed bows up.
    He says: "You're on the Eastside now.
    You fuck with him; you fuck with us."
        All the children, breaking it down.
        Come on, children. Break it down.

2. SWEET DISORDER!

Mountain mist gives way to a yellow haze
As we glimpse, from the backseat,
Southtown kids waiting for the bus in blurs of white and navy-blue.
Out past the city wall, each little kingdom
Fills its stucco citadel with tow-headed children
As we file quietly, hush now, into the long dark pews.

Stolen girls sit locked inside
The sweating walls of sodden motels
Lining the barricade our fathers named First Avenue North.
Rusted buses ship strong young men
To prisons risen in the fields of old plantations,
Where their bodies are turned to profits by our fathers’ courts.

    O, sisters,
        can you shout it out?
                            Sweet disorder!
    O, children,
        how do we ditch
        involuntary servitude,
        and form
        a true union?
                            Sweet disorder!

The hills rippling out from the interstate
Hide overgrown mills and backfilled holes,
Left in the wake of the company’s long burning march south.
The board still lays blame on cheaper, darker men,
Once creekbeds, now oceans, away,
Who outpace the gun into the fiery furnace and the mine’s black mouth.

    O, brothers,
        can you write it out?
                            Sweet disorder!
    O, children,
        how do we scrap
        globalist American plutocracy,
        and build us
        a magic city?
                            Sweet disorder!

3. GOOD OLD BOY

Jackson acted up; you called the principal!
Dearrick acted up; you called the fuzz!
Jackson acted up; you called the principal!
Dearrick acted up; you called the fuzz!

    You call yourself a good old boy.

Billy spoke out; you called a meeting!
Brittney spoke out; you called the shrink!
Billy spoke out; you called a meeting!
Brittney spoke out; you called the shrink!

    You call yourself a good old boy.

Bradford couldn’t pass; you sent him to a tutor!
Randy couldn’t pass; you sent him to work!
Bradford couldn’t pass; you sent him to a tutor!
Randy couldn’t pass; you just sent his ass to work!

    You call yourself a good old boy.
    You call yourself a good old boy.
    You, you, you,
    You ain’t no good old boy.
    You ain't no good
    Old boy.
    You, you, you,
    You ain't no good old boy.
    You ain't no good
    Old boy.

4. BLACK & WHITE BOYS

In a fog of stolen tears and drugs, he
Smiles at the lunchroom,
Shouts into that pale, fluorescent tomb,
And sits with his stoned, white, shit-headed pack.
He waves from his table,
The fresh and clean, the black and bright,
Whose laughter rolls like water despite
The teacher’s white-hot gaze at their backs.

We’d found syringes and snakes
In that crumbling park,
Growing like vines till streetlamps sparked,
Ordaining dopeboys with blazing crowns.
From the backs of our parents’ cars,
They’d shrink into sinking streets,
Lips parting as if to speak.
Crickets and trains blanket the city in sound.
Blanket the city in sound.

    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    Eat up with the borderlines.
    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    Washed out in stoic Southern sunshine.

Blue in the glow, thumbs thrumming in the fight,
He sighs, “I want to be white.”
I hit reset, and volunteer to be green.
Static reflecting off his eyes, he lays his finger
On my arm. “White,” he whispers.
Words warp. I stare into the screen.
Words warp. I stare into the screen.
Words warp. I stare into the screen.

    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    Taught to walk the borderlines.
    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    Washed out in stoic Southern sunshine.

        The Lord’s mercy, swears Demarcus,
        Falls like rain on old boys like us,
        Hard-headed, soft-hearted, wild as hell.
        May the Lord judge the county that
            sent me to get clean,
            and sent D to turn fifteen
        Staring through the walls of a Mt. Meigs cell.
    
    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    Eat up with the borderlines.
    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    Drowning in the stoic Southern sunshine.
    God save us
    White boys from
    Crouching behind what we didn’t earn.
    God save us,
    Black & white boys,
    And show us what to smash and burn.

5. WHITEWASH

There we sat,
In fluorescent haloes,
The tiny flowering redemptions
Of sharecroppers and miners and slaves,
Offering up to our class,
Beneath the TV, the flag and the cross,
Our ridge-and-valley twangs and drawls,
Birthmarks to be scrubbed away.

    I don’t want to be a whitewash.
    I don’t want to be an absence.
    I don’t want to be the great silence.
    I want to be—
    
    I don’t want to be a whitewash.
    I don’t want to be nobody.
    I don’t want to be from noplace.
    I want to be—

In that little formica nook,
Ladies at the steamtable, men from the scrapyard,
Curling wisps from cornbread and collards,
The soul of home, of souls forced west.
The landlord will sell Ms. Glen’s lease
To continental cafes and unblinking empire,
Pulling this scrap of red clay from those who
Loved her through the worst, who loved her best.

    I don’t want to be a whitewash.
    Don’t want to wipe out memory.
    Don’t want to fortify a colony.
    I want to be—

    I don’t want to be a whitewash.
    Don’t want power over anybody.
    Don’t want dominion over anyplace.
    I want to be—

        Floating above
        Your scrapped-together smoker,
        In that hazy little yard
        On the sleepy Eastside,
        Smiling through blue strands of smoke
        At everybody passing—
        You’re singing,
        As if
        Heaven
        Is
        Other folks.

You might could sell them a book,
Set in the boutiques of some blanched borough,
In the sterile, phantom code of the mobile, modern,
Skinny, shiny, and guilt-free.
But you belong to the Free State of Winston.
Her pines creak in your words, high and lonesome:
“I’ve got a people, and a history,
And a place bearing down on me.”

    I don’t want to be a whitewash,
    Turning places into sets,
    Turning people into objects.
    I want to be—

    I don’t want to be a whitewash.
    Don’t want power over anybody.
    Don’t want dominion over anyplace.
    I want to be—

        I don’t want to be a whitewash.
        I don’t want to be a whitewash.
        I don’t want to be a whitewash.
        I don’t want to be a whitewash.

6. UNDERNEATH THE SHEETS OF WHITE NOISE

The suburban skies
Crackled with the signal.
The national TV crews had descended
On the press conferences and vigils,
The food-court pundits at the mall.
She looked out
Through her frozen blue eyes,
From all the grocery-store checkout-line front-pages
At the tiny, grainy, black and brown faces
In yellowing flyers pinned to the wall.

Her objections are
Inspired, literate, brilliant,
In her cutting cadence, in her Northside drawl,
When Ms. England cuts her off,
Saying, “Girl, you’re just too loud!”
She has bowed her
Braided, beaded head back toward her notes, but
I can sense her shoulders slightly shake.
I can hear the tears tapping on the page.
I can see the ink begin to cloud.

The infield is thick with
Cries of “burnt biscuit” and “white chocolate.”
Then “bitch,” “bank account,” “peckerwood.”
I grow red in the stinging swarm of words
When somebody yells and points at the street.
There, like some old Western movie,
A few Mexican boys
Kick a ball into the park’s dusty fringe.
The posse turns from me to glare at the in-
Truders. I drink deep of the hateful relief.

    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        This city sings her multitudes,
    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        The verses long, the beats raw and loose.
    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        She sings awake her daughters and sons,
    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        And, at my very best, I’m only one.

You envision the
Raj’s stone halls, the dark, defiled Ganges.
She slaps the lectern. Snow hurries past the window.
She points to the silent roar of burning widows,
Blackened figures on a bleached field.
Your thoughts turn south,
The crowd outside the hunched foodmart,
And that sagging copy of an old plantation,
Windows clad in pressboard, columns kudzu-laced.
Can the cornerboys speak?
Can the collegeboy hear?

    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        This city sings her multitudes,
    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        The verses long, the beats raw and loose.
    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        She sings awake her daughters and sons,
    Underneath the sheets of white noise
                        And, at my very best, I’m only one.

7. I HEARD GOD!

I imagine
He runs
The thick black dye through thinning hair,
Squeezes some hip band’s t-shirt on,
And finds himself inside his phone.
In his picture, he's always 20,
In a handsome, tragic crowd, now over the hill.
Photos of fishing, Sunday dinners
And babies crawl past.
He's the only one to keep it real.

She says
They arrived
From New Haven early that morning.
She'd assured her of what to expect
In clipped, unplaceable tones, so refined, so correct.
She waved her hand across the malls and interstates,
All so clean and bright and young,
But that fresh-painted old sign shouting,
"GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU,"
Locked up her jaw,
And steeled her tongue.
    
    I was spinning in the static when I heard God.
    I was spinning in the static when I heard God.
    I’m fairly certain I was spinning in the static the first time I heard God.
    
        I heard God.
        I heard God.

It could’ve been
The patio fans or the fiberglass fountain,
The lowing hum of passing donks,
The wash of Southside’s children, night-loud and youth-drunk.
I croaked as I reached for his lighter.
It forced its way into my mouth
Through pillars of smoke, spilling waters.
(“if you want to live, tell the truth.”)
I parted my lips,
And it washed out.

    I was spinning in the static when I heard God.
    I was spinning in the static when I heard God.
    I’m fairly certain I was spinning in the static the first time I heard God.

        I heard God.
        I heard God.

            I don’t know.
            I don’t know.
            I just don’t know.

8. CROOKED LETTERS

Reverend, was poor old Lazarus raised up after all
    to save the rich man’s folks?
Under the bench, she rubs her crusted eyes, where she lies,
    vested in some dead man’s clothes.
As our shined shoes clatter past, the bells boom off glassy cliffs,
    drifting slowly down
Onto the purring suburban engines of dark-suited men
    who shall inherit downtown.

The boys demand to know if he’s white or black, and squint
    into his sun-browned face, framed with black curls of hair.
He sighs, and, with his finger, draws sprawling maps
    of the Middle East into the hot damp heavy air.
"So, are you white or black?" His mouth falls open.
    His eyes trace the patchy skyline, frayed by the evening sun.
A green-neon crucifix crowns the steeple where, Sundays,
    His folks recite prayers in the Lord's dead tongue.

        Ten winding years, and I can't decide,
        Which ones to discard, and which ones to abide.
    
            All the crooked letters.

Slow to admit what I can’t fix, I stare at the wall,
    smudged and stark, sprayed with white light, a flickering page.
The coffee’s burnt, the styrofoam sour,
    the creamer in clumps, the verses crumbling away.
Beneath the daytime TV babble run the rattle and the whine
    of the impact wrench.
Eyes fixed in space, the body man drags his hand over the seam.
    It’s not a straightening out, but a shaping over and over and over again.

        Three winding years, and I can’t decide
        Which ones to discard, and which ones should abide.

            All the crooked letters.

9. I CAN CHANGE!

I stare up into the dark granite face of the cop.
    A river of white roils around his horse’s flanks.
Grown folks hang over barricades, shouting down
    the hooded red-faced men lapping at 20th Street’s banks.
We trail mama and daddy back to the parking deck,
Past air-conditioned skyscrapers, so proud and just.
Ladies in hats gather the slanting shade of the confederate obelisk.
Dudes in fades, girls in braids, voices hoarse, search for the bus.

        I can change!
        I can change!

The scraggly men smoked cigarettes and scowled,
    salted in sheetrock dust,
The wind whipping their long hair across the rebel flag,
    airbrushed on the rear window of the truck.
I muttered something to you about white trash.
In the frontseat, Granddaddy's easy drawl sharpened into nails.
He clapped his cracked red hand onto my doughy leg:
He said, "Son, you aren't any better than anybody else."

        I can change!
        I can change!

            It was like taking a breath
            When I admitted that:
            Guilt is not a feeling;
            It's a natural fact.

        I can change!
        I can change!
        I can change!
        I can change!

                Get loose!

        I can change!
        I can change!

            It was like taking a breath
            When I admitted that:
            Guilt is not a feeling;
            It's a natural fact.

10. THE CITY WALLS

He grinds the butt under his boot, and breathes a white rope of smoke
    westward into the black sky,
Over the woods where Mama says Eastside kids used to could find arrowheads
    but have long since been bled dry.
And eulogizing that wild old city,
Where he had once found his peace,
He points the bottle like a cannon down from the ridge,
    and out into the sprawl.
"It's like they think downtown's cute, so they move in,
    and turn it into a god-damned mall."

As they hotboxed that tricked-out Japanese rocket, I stole breaths
    through the window, cracked open, tinted dark.
I was stuck in between the fear of pissing cloudy
    and the fear of coming off looking like a narc.
They wore invincibility as if it were fine linen,
Like kids from that side of the mountain often seemed to do.
Holding my breath, I regretted picking their lunchroom table,
    and exhaled as we neared my parents’ block.    
We passed the squat green sign. They dropped the N-bomb.
    “Uh oh, City of Birmingham. Be sure to keep your doors locked.”
        I said, “Goddammit…

            I don't want to live in a tiny kingdom.
            I don't want to live beyond the city walls.
            I don't want to hide in my sin in a tiny kingdom.
            I don't want to die beyond the city walls.

He and his sister are forever bent mid-laugh in black-and-white,
    in afros, in paisley, in     youth.
His finger smudges the out-of-focus brick apartments. He nods his greying head
    catty-corner to the empty lot, tangled with kudzu.
The track-hoe groans behind the weedy curtain.
(We hear that condos will be going up soon.)
Up the street, another building strangled with chain-link,
    they’ve already boarded up the doors.
The dumpsters runneth over with soggy blankets and broken chairs. He says,
    "But, yeah, we've been here since '64."

            We don't want to live in a tiny kingdom.
            We don't want to live beyond the city walls.
            We don't want the city turned into a tiny kingdom.
            We don't want nobody buried beneath the city walls.
                Tear down the city walls!

11. HAD TO LAUGH

I burned the last of the resin,
Skipping Sunday school, wishing
I could torch all I’d ever done
(didn’t I?),
Racing back to church under
Downtown’s bluffs of brick and stone,
Desolate as a bone in the morning sun
(didn’t I?).

I was doing 120, torn up on 280,
In the wagon my brother handed down to me,
Wishing for it all to end
(didn’t I?).
You were hidden inside the fortress walls of
Some bamboo jungle, shotgunning weed
With one of my so-called friends
(weren’t you?).

    When you told me that
    You’d never fall in love…
    (Did you really mean that?)
    When you told me that
    You’d never fall in love,
    You know I had to laugh.

My eyes were clear.
My tail was tucked.
The road was straight. The night was black.
(Yeah, it was!)
The phone buzzed.
My ears rang.
The sun crawled over Fairfield, the rows of cold smokestacks.
(Yeah, they were!)

    When I told you that
    I'd never fall in love…
    (Yeah, I really said that.)
    When I told you that
    I'd never fall in love,
    I know you had to laugh.

12. NAIL MY FEET DOWN TO THE SOUTHSIDE OF TOWN

Drunk with the dew, dumb with the weight,
We watched the towers fall through film and dust.
The stores sold out of flags, brave children pushing in line
To prove the love of a father who would prove to give them up.
Now we’re down at the fountain, and there’s war in the skies,
And we’re calling down the Peace of The Lord,
I lean into the idling truck. It smells like burnt oil and cologne.
He drones: “I killed a bunch in the last one. Can’t wait to kill more.”

Bathed in the sweetness of cut grass, speckled with red clay and defeat,
We drain cans of purple nectar, cleats clicking on the sidewalk.
We, soft boys from the leafy mountain, shadow the cut-up sons
Of the concrete valley, who spit and cuss and revelate like men as they talk.
Will the cop-calling colonists hear the ghostmen talking about that All-Star game?
The sneers and slurs from the visitors’ dugout at the raggedy shoes Darius had on?
At Bo’s gentle air? At Sameer’s daddy’s accent? The way Ricky tore off after them?
Bat crossed behind scarlet neck: “Man, you got to show out for your own.”

    Nail my feet down, down to the Southside of town.
    Bend my back into it: the 24th Street viaduct.
    Watch my hair grow long and tangle up
In the smoke still rising from the stacks.
    Encase my tongue in steel,
        In case I ever dare to say,
            “I’m stuck.”

Shrouded in black, suckling on cigarettes,
Crammed into our girlfriends’ hand-me-down jeans.
Our arms are crossed, heads nodding to every song,
Like we already know, or just don’t care, what it means.
And, at his post on the corner, John: thick matted beard and torn heavy coat,
His face contorted by voices. The wounded dudes are all cracking up.
I fall quiet and watch him silently read off the transmissions,
The last shouts of children falling through the fading Southtown summer dusk.

    Nail my feet down, down to the Southside of town.
    Bend my back into it: the 24th Street viaduct.
    Watch my hair grow long and tangle up
In the smoke still rising from the stacks.
    Encase my tongue in steel,
        In case I ever dare to say,
            “I’m stuck.”

13. TONGUES OF FLAME!

All
The learners’ permit scholars
Found her so provincial.
We,
The private-school rebels,
Figured her for a narc.

        But that fall morning when a small girl, eyes black
            and wide and searching,
                                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Appeared in the corner of the classroom, her
            forehead furrowed, like stirred coffee,
                                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Who but we buried our heads in grammar lessons
            and radical notebook scribbles?
                                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Who flipped her hair and approached, thick with
            Shelby County syrup:     Encantada. ¿Cómo esta?

He walks
Through the needling rays of the
Summer noontime,
Neck craned to the horizon.
Sidewalks crumble
Under his shuffling feet.
His sign reads:
REPARATIONS NOW!

        In the cool of a distant spring morning,
            he will pad in front of me,
            speaking softly in winding sentences,
                                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Among his altars and spires of broken objects,
            on which weeds and water do their work,
                                    (Tongues of flame!)
        And, trailing off,
            he will rest his hand on my shoulder,
            and point at the passing breeze,
                                    (Tongues of flame!)
        And whisper, “Listen.
            Listen as the Lord passes by.”
    
The
Collar, pinched tight around
The rolls of my neck.
The wood,
Hard, unforgiving,
Against my flat back:

        We are squirming in the stillness of a strange room.
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        In the muted Highland Avenue traffic sits a huge white scroll.
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Gone is the crooked nervous grin of our boy. His voice stumbles,
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Then falls into a rhythm, wide and deep and sweet. They say this is to                 become a man.
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Sweet old Ms. Noles sprung up like a piston,
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Her brown wrinkled face, nestled in a huge white hat, pointed to the                 heavens,
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Her open mouth sending forth a rolling stream of secret words,
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        Her tiny rocking body haloed by the gentle hands of stone-faced men.
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        And the drums and organ kick in, and the choir lifts its voice,
                    (Tongues of flame!)
        And I, feeling faint, fall into the arms of an old familiar song.
                    (Tongues of flame!)

14. TRYING TO RIDE

Hunched over, staring at the blurry patch of the rug between my boots,
I was commanded to sit up straight and look.
I watched those verbose pearls roll off the tongues of my elders,
And ground them into dust under my hoof.
    I’m still hard-headed, and I still can’t stand people living all over me,
    But those hard-headed folks pushed me into my own way of doing right and             getting free.

            Trying to ride.

My shoulder to the B pillar, I strained for the conversation,
Yelling through the wind at the boys sitting inside,
Watching hot rocks skitter out the black gap in the window
And into the cosmos and headlights.
    But night swept along the side of the cab, and it swallowed up every sound.
    My dark hair crept across my burning cheek, and I turned on back around.

            Trying to ride.

                She cut off Heaven 810, and
                Looked down at me with her stern, dark eyes,
                Said: "It don't matter how good it sounds;
                Don't you never sing a lie."
        
            Trying to ride.

15. THE PICTURE OF A MAN

She scratches a faint beard,
Sinew and smoke against a wall of cinderblock,
Casting her nets for a ride to work in the dust of a gravel lot,
    Calling on the picture of a man.
The grizzled gentlemen and loafered princes
Who, she will tell me, light up her phone late at night,
Hustle past without spilling a word in the dying purple light,
    Just like the picture of a man.

On a sun-bleached couch in a dusty cramped apartment,
You’ll stroke my straining neck, your eyes flashing blue.
And the things he did I’ve hardly told myself I will sit and tell to you.
    But what is the picture of a man?
You’ll draw out the barbed years, working open
My clenched bony throat till his fists start to lose their hold.
And maybe some shining morning, I’ll pray for peace on his soul,
    But what is the picture of a man?
    Tell me, what is the picture of a man?

        I still believe, children, in some kind of warm, forgiving light
        That bears us away from our worn-out bodies and this wartorn life.
        And, I don’t know, but if anybody in this world just fades to black,
        I’d think it’s the man that lives off picking on them that are being held                 back.

The lunchroom simmers just above silence,
Every face buried in the school paper, which we seldom read.
His proclamation blooms through the black-and-white photocopied sheet,
    Like burning petals on the picture of a man.
The blood rushes into my cheeks.
I quake before him, so bare, bold, reconciled.
My ugly words rush back, taking shape as the work of a child
    Desperate to hide in the picture of a man.
I flood with the shame of a hateful child
    Beaten down by the picture of a man.
I plead guilty as that brutal child,
    So bound by the picture of a man.
How do I do right by that terrified child,
    So lost in the picture of a man?
    So lost in the picture of a man?
    So lost in the picture of a man?

16. COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS FOR THE DEINDUSTRIALIZED DISPERSION

If the grey morning finds you,
Strange and cold in some great Northern city,
Shoes slick and black in the slush,
The tires hushing spray,
    Please think upon those slow days
    In the long green arms of the river.

If, at the end of your workday,
You find upon your tongue a barren dialect,
And the sheetrocked boxes you increasingly call home,
Feel, somehow, both dead and new.
    Chase the sweet stink of downtown, and let spill forth
    The honeyed words of your raising.
        May we all grow old and free,
        And wander home again.

If homeward odes take wing from your lips
To flutter down dead onto a plywood stage,
And the red-clay soil you swore you’d die for
Hasn’t touched your feet in weeks,
    Repent of your pride and your worry.
    Remember to ride, like your home folks said.
        May we all grow old and free,
        And wander home again.

17. SAVE MY LIFE!

She spit and stomped, and something in me broke.
Melodies drawling unashamed, sweet and ragged
Like angels around the throne.

He prowls the crowded living-room floor,
Squalls and screams commanding:
Get right or get gone!

Nineteenth Street throbbed to the art of storytelling.
The Atlanta boys broke it down. We, from every side of town,
So wild, so together, so grown.

    Don’t you tell me, “It’s only rock’n’roll.”
    When I’ve seen it wrestle truths from noise.
                                    Save my life!

    Don’t you tell me, “It’s only rock’n’roll,”
    When I’ve seen it rejoice in the borderlands.
                                    Save my life!

Fingering the blade, licking the bottle’s lip,
I grow still at the warbling voice in the tape:
Beauty hissing from a hurt untold.

She sang like she talked, played like she burned.
We looked at our handiwork,
Fistfuls of dirt spraypainted gold.

When these words grow stale and crumble in my mouth,
Will I lean back and ride the beat?
Truth is hard to touch, and still harder to hold.

    Don’t you tell me, “It’s only rock’n’roll,”
    When I’ve seen it pull wisdom from nasty mouths.
                                    Save my life!
    
    Don’t you tell me, “It’s only rock’n’roll,”
    When I’ve seen it spit patois like fire.
                                    Save my life!
    
    Don’t you tell me, “It’s only rock’n’roll,”
    When I’ve seen it anoint mildewed basements as sanctuaries.    
                                    Save my life!