It's all quiet on the western front
When towers fall and empires crumble
When storms ravage half a country
A thousand screams are silenced by a handful

It's all quiet on the western front
When mothers mourn and monsters meet
Inside of laminate portfolios
With bright futures and buried pleasures

It's all quiet on the western front
When seconds make cents
And it no longer makes sense
To tell them that you love them
Without paper doing it as well as
The trees they carved their names in

It's all quiet on the western front
When blood is used as currency
To buy and polish ammunition
From nations drowning
In the smell of rusted crimson
And think of the children
Who are armed to the teeth
With spite and grief and melancholy
Against the thrumming of their rib cages
With rounds discharged like the veterans
Who were just in the wrong place
But at what time
Did the commander think it wise
To drop explosives on civilians?

It's all quiet on the western front
When business is just for staying busy
Complacent couples with granite counters
Correcting their children in their grammar
Or their choices in careers

It's all quiet on the western front
When adding two and two together
Becomes menial work pushed to the
Calculators made by cracked palms
And shaking fingers which we pay
2 dollars an hour
To do the tasks our brittle bodies
Had enough of the first time a television
Switched on, the first time someone
Picked up a bottle, the first cigarette ever lit
in the suburbs

And the yelling is done in an organized fashion
With labels thrown up in the air
And as the prosecution rests
The poor boy's family hold their heads
As if the ceiling would start to cave in
On itself and like the system
It is truly hell to barely scrape
By life only to brush by death's
Shoulder and regret 300 years worth of unity
Which separates the equal and demeans
Those who try to be
And to those peering out across
The scarlet sea, the shine
And gold may be worth the trials and
Tribulations but tenacious souls
Need only know that gold is rock and
Crystal sheen is merely a reflection
Of the destruction and the silence
And the demons that we will not confront

And in the presence of a microphone
The world falls still
And wonders if the speaker will respond
Or if they won't


It's still all quiet on the western front.