UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED


1.
You don’t know your steering wheel from your transmission.
You don’t know your tailpipe from your ignition.
Yet you think you can control the spark
In me with which I disembark
From you with all your booby prizes,
Plastic trash in bright disguises.
You’re fooled into thinking that you’re so patrician,
But you’re miles from home and it’s getting dark.
If you could see how Nature individualizes,
Then maybe you could tell a lamb from a shark.

2.
It’s too late to shop for an antidote;
You’re married to your mother, that unholy cutthroat.
Your nightmares are merely her nocturnal emission.
The only phase left is your decomposition.
You vote for a con man who talks like Candide:
It’s no mystery why you never succeed.
By mere accident, you stay afloat,
Puffed with panic and inhibition.
I’ve often wondered where you learned to misread
The obvious facts of the human condition.

3.
You don’t know a vulture from a skylark.
You’re makin’ me feel just like the Prince of Denmark,
When I watch you whore after church and flag,
Then turn to me and start to nag
That it’s my fault whenever the price of bread rises,
Yet it’s your own face that your mirror despises.
When you were a girl, did you like to park -
To court and spark and maybe snag
A boy in that mouth which evangelizes
Now about lies scribbled on an old rag?

4.
You follow wherever the bad shepherds lead,
Then wonder why your pockets bleed.
A TV preacher hypnotizes
You into thinking one god fits all sizes.
I invite you, instead, to study a dust mote,
Then rethink to what god your time you devote.
Superstition is unsafe at any speed.
Spastic-but-surely, it pulverizes
Any innocent soul it can use for a scapegoat.
Yet it’s the stale script that your blood memorizes.


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986