Ink lines our lungs,
As words fill our pages,
Wagging tongues whip,
As a silent war rages.
It rages in your backyard,
It rages in your home,
It comes in through your tv set,
And in your mind when you're alone.
In the whisper of white noise,
the small print of advertising conditions,
One hundred and eleven soldiers, boys,
Fighting a war of policitians.
It comes in through your windows,
It is settled on the streets,
It's in graffiti, in prose,
It comes in through the door,
Trudging, homeless, through the sleet.
It sits in cells, and marks the days,
as tap drips and time delays.
Is the "scum" of society, the so-called grime,
(The uneducated, uncivilised, unrefined,
The hopeless but the hoping,
the barely living but somehow coping)
A symbol of a united, sunburnt country?
Hidden behind bowls of potpourri.
To some extent we are all free,
Taught to listen, yet not to hear,
Taught not to love, yet taught to fear.
At the ATM, consume yourself,
At the lightswitch, burning the iceshelf,
you can feel the fight in your fingertips,
it continues as words on your lips.
"We fight a war of peace."
Do we really?
with one hundred and eleven custody deaths yearly,
This is our war,
We fight it every day,
'Save the earth',
'Save our children'
'Save us until it is too late'
Voices of protest become one,
Until it becomes too much, too hard, too sad,
Until even the hippy's got a gun.