Get it down help it across step it up move like water
Fork it over hand it under never let your dreams be torn down
Stand up to it look right at it in the eye state it over and over
I won't back down again and again no I won't back down
My friend my son my brother my sister my father my mother
My wife my neighbor my coworker my boss my fellow strangers
No one will ever get out alive every one must face the reaper alone
We're all in it a part of the whole each individual cell in a colony
With our role to play along in this building symphony of song
A chorus rising and falling through outer space while ebbing and flowing
Along without a trace of evidence left in its wake except for the twinkling
stars strewn forward and back in a grand celestial swarming of birth
and death echoing back in lengthening radio waves of fading reception
while we gaze in a direction we mistake as outward oblivious
to our place in the expanding branes of creation to be recycled
into the permanent installation we might think of as the artifice
of articulation the ultimate portrait reflection shading the emerging
contour of a face beyond the scope of our capacity to receive
with the singular exception of a second guessed fate like
the wavering image cast back from the surface of a rippling lake
that catches our attention to arrest us in place on a split mind
trip of objectification magnifying our individual egos out of proportion
from the whole until we confuse ourselves with the dream of god
in constant tides of awakening even while legion fall back into sleep
to be continued in the next verse while the worst is on its way
this remains the chant of the waking dreamers we will never back down
or go away because no matter how those who may oppose us try their own blindness will lead them astray because only the true know the way
through the darkness with our eyes shut to step into the den of beasts
bare handed with our raw and bloody hearts still pumping on our sleeves with courage in the face of danger we surmount every challenge
that comes our way with our feet firmly grounded on the current of time and our heads held high with a black hole halo around each one of us we skid and slide and stumble only to tumble onward with trust
each one of us a living ghost whose fading image remains
as an impression framed in liminal light as the shroud of a memory
only polishes brighter like the jewel of an eye that will never rot
by shaun lawton