Oppressive silence
Brings me to my knees;
Embracing the hopeless despair
That accompanies the same quiet
That comes before calamity strikes-
Before the storm touches down over land;
Before all hell breaks loose.
This forbidden orchestra
Of bodiless volume,
Plucks invisible strings
of the Fates, intertwined
To tug at my faithless heart
As I survey the scorched earth below.
How hollow it all seems now;
These trumpets of victory
Sounding choked and strained
Cracking under the weight of their lies,
Bursting the brass
as they bugle out a call to rebel-
For who could call this bitter resolution a victory?
Who could name it clean,
Justified,
When all but the truly frightened
succumb to this heinous masterpiece
Why think to make a new tune,
It asks us;
Why make a new composition,
When the old one will suffice?
Rolling over and over again,
Into new hands with the same minds,
The cycle begins again;
Exchanging one facade for another,
As the musicians warm up,
Ready to play the music that we've always danced to;
Mere puppets to the Maestros
That conduct and direct
Our shattered hopes and dreams.
Shall we not contradict
The balance of power,
Or else leave it to sit in the hands of fools and tyrants?
Once composed,
It can still be unwritten,
Unlearned;
A performance piece we won't allow any longer,
A dying art that deserves the dust that we've crawled from.
We are not pawns in a chord that will not harmonize with us;
We are not weak, shallow things that crawl
beneath the feet of these giants;
We are music itself,
A ballad of shared ideals,
A melody of minds,
unsullied by the temptation of power,
Our discordant notes falling away as we remember our worth in this world.
Like a crescendo,
We can join,
We can rise to change the music,
Rippling and reverberating across this vast auditorium-
For the whole world is our stage,
Our audience;
And they are looking to us,
To be better than what we've known before.
I can hear the beginning notes,
Wavering at first,
Whistled on lips in back alleys
Whispered on the streets,
In our hearts-
Calling to us,
Pleading with us to change the outcome this time,
Asking us the only question that matters :
Will you stand to ovation?
Or will you fall to devotion?