I stayed up all night,
Looking for the  Sun,
And then it dawned on me....

That deserves  
A rim shot at
The very least..
Or maybe,   Even some slow,
Low,    slide  trombone, muted for style,   with a plunger.

This place is as close as you
Can get to living on an island.  
Almost completely  surrounded by sea.    
A  rocky  coast,         cliffs scrapping the sky.    
Strong riptides, with their brother, the other one,
The one and only, here he is...   the infamous, Mister  Undertow.
            
The land's well worn mountains are now hills,  
Windswept over centuries.  
The hills,  the harbors..... the Valley,
Stretching  more than three hundred  miles,
Blooming with fruits,  orchards of all kinds  
**** lands, and cattle farms and other livestock, and history.

When I was a child I couldn't stand it,
All my friends couldn't wait
To quit school and head west,
Armed with a larger wallet for
The big bucks that were to be made.

All that was found was greed and fear and stony faces.
People leaving their families back home,
They might as well have been going off to war.
They ***** the land and squeezed its oil sands,
All the while there eyes growing maniacal.

Big dollar signs is all everybody could see.
The leaders and the rich pushed and pushed
And ****** and ******, Wanting more and more.
They scraped and scraped until everything was black.
Black as black can be, black as the dark side of the moon.

Now, I look ahead,
And I look behind,
I see that I slipped through the cracks.
I encountered no war.
I wasn't faced with the prospect of
Blowing someones face off,
Or getting my self killed.
I like to tell myself that I
Would rather go to prison
Than to  have to shoot some one.
I wonder if I would have the guts.


When they come from "away"  
They call us Blue-Nosers
And think us quaint...
Better a Blue-Noser  
Than a Brown-Noser.
I  tell  myself,
Better to be free
Than to chase Money.