Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Animal

More and more there is this animal
Looking out through my eyes
At all the traffic on the road to nowhere
At all the shiny stuff around to buy
At all the wires in the air
At all the people shopping
For the same blank stare
At america the drastic
That isolated geographic
That's become infested with millionaires

When you grow up surrounded
By willful ignorance
You have to believe
Mercy has its own country
And that it's round and borderless
And then you have to grow wings
And rise above it all
Like there
Where that hawk is circling
Above that strip mall

More and more there is this animal
Looking out through my eyes
Seeing that animals only
take from this world
What they need to survive
But she is prowling through all
the religions of men


Seeing that time and time and time again
Their gods have made them
Special and above
Nature's law
And the respect thereof

And I think when you grow up surrounded
By willful ignorance
You have to believe that mercy
has its own country
And that it's round and borderless
And then you just grow wings
And rise above it all
Like there where that hawk is circling
Above that strip mall

Ask any eco-system
Harm here is harm there
And there and there
And aggression begets aggression
It's a very simple lesson
That long preceded any king of heaven
And there's this brutal imperial power
That my passport says I represent
But it will never represent
where my heart lives
Only vaguely where it went


Cause I know when you grow up surrounded
By willful ignorance
You learn that mercy has its own country
And that it's round and borderless
And then you just grow wings
And rise above it all
Like there
Where that hawk is circling
Above that strip mall

-Ani Difranco

7 comments:

  1. LOVE ani difranco!!!! love her!
    I need to go buy some of her stuff. right now!

    p.s. interesting new blog title :)

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  2. so does interesting mean "not good"?

    lessie and i were having a discussion about being average people, and being happy with being an average person and this came to mind.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "interesting' means... well, 'interesting'

    I think it is refreshing after seeing several blogs named things along the lines of "you've never seen anything like this before" or "I'm not like anyone else you know", or stuff like that.

    I actually do have a lot of issues with my own mediocrity. For some reason (mental illness, head-injury as a child, whatever) I have real difficulty coming to terms with my own averageness.
    I wish I could be comfortable accepting it, but I have a lot of inner knives that cut me up over it.

    wish I could have listened in to that conversation you guys had. would have been enlightening.

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  4. opps, that last one was me... signed in under another account.

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  5. i got excite for a minute. i thought morrisey and johhnny marr got back together. (ba dum dum)

    yeah, I said that I should have nf design me a tshirt that says:

    "im average and exceptionally proud of it"

    and then my mind gets going and here i am. if theres one thing i do well, it's mediocrity.

    ReplyDelete
  6. so, i just got of the email with julie rose and then read the comments on this post and i was reminded that i stole that very last sentance from her.

    there you go, jrose, credit where credit is due.

    ReplyDelete
  7. We should maybe do a three way phone call some evening. Or, if G wanted to get a g-mail account, a three way chat (can you do that?). I'll e-mail G that link so she can see the article we were discussing.

    And G, your art is anything but mediocre. That's another angle mpm and I were talking about, we all have things that we excel at naturally, and we should go with those and not worry ourselves that we don't do every thing exceptionally well.

    ReplyDelete

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