oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith

Lyrics/Poems for Our Age


Frequent contributor Bill Murath sent in a song recommendation whose lyrics, he suggests, "are so fitting of the time now." Have a read/listen and see if you agree; I certainly do.

The percentage you're paying is too high priced
While you're living beyond all your means
And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he's made on your dreams
But today you just read that the man was shot dead
By a gun that didn't make any noise
But it wasn't the bullet that laid him to rest was
The low spark of high-heeled boys

If you had just a minute to breathe and they granted you one final wish
Would you ask for something like another chance?
Or something similar as this? Don't worry too much
It'll happen to you as sure as your sorrows are joys
And the thing that disturbs you is only the sound of
The low spark of high-heeled boys

If I gave you everything that I owned and asked for nothing in return
Would you do the same for me as I would for you?
Or take me for a ride, and strip me of everything including my pride
But spirit is something that no one destroys
And the sound that I'm hearing is only the sound
The low spark of high-heeled boys

The Low Spark of the High-Heeled Boys
by Steve Winwood/Jim Capaldi and recorded by Traffic in 1972.

My own recommendation is justifiably famous but has never seemed more accurate than in our "house of mirrors and lies/The Emperor has no clothes" era:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats 1921

Shall we hazard a comment and suggest the falconer is our better sense, and the falcon our nation, running out of control on so many levels, loosing a blood-dimmed tide? As for the worst being full of passionate intensity--look no further than your nearest ideologue pounding the podium for the next war, culturally or geopolitically, insulting and deriding any and all opposition with any means at hand (wishing John Edwards had been killed in a terror attack, such a thoughtful, reasonable political comment, the true voice of unmuzzled right-wing purity).

As for the ceremony of innocence--a belief that no one is above the law, and that the law is above political meddling--it has indeed been drowned by Executive privilege, the last resort of liars and thieves. Yet the nation dances in the street of "endless prosperity," mindless of everything but what can be purchased, consumed or displayed in a show of self-absorbed pride.

As things fall apart--and certainly the center is not holding--perhaps mere anarchy will soon be loosed on our built-on-the-shifting-sands-of-lies world.