It's All About Ticket Sales, It's Not About Setting Sail

Rooster Original


It's all about ticket sales, it's not about setting sail.
This old world's docked in the harbor and you're
trying to speak your mind but it gets harder and harder,
When you're driving in a boat, when you're riding
in a plane to arrive on time for the look-alike-game.
People fearing the new hell, the "uncool," the "out of date,"
the "cultural slug," some kind of title of shame.
People passing past wearing concentration on their faces,
and you can't see past their concrete gazes,
Races going on down the sidewalks of the city,
minds talking out of pity and not for what's right:
What means something? What's worth holding onto and growing?
Plucking for kids, planting in heads?
"That's what I want to do!" "That's what I want to say!"
"That's what I want to teach to my own kids someday!"
So you keep on speaking, and your eyeballs shift,
and then you find that other folks have the same gift,
But they don't have space and they don't have room,
They're held up high, tied up tight with a string
by some imaginary money made tune,
Waiting in lines to escape feeling all the dread.
Can it be too late, now that we've got pixels in our heads?
What if some of us people just want to slow down
and do some unlearning instead?
We're in this glass palace jail, and we can see outside,
How the earth gives itself with nothing to hide,
But the door's closed and the window's frozed,
You want to get out but nobody knows
quite how to create the plan to get past the foes
that don't look into your eyes but instead stick up their nose.
So you pound. And you pound. And you pound. And you pound again.
And then your struggle becomes known to a friend,
and he pounds too, 'till his face turns blue,
And in comes another and another and another still,
And then the glass shatters. And nothing else matters,
And all the chatter turns out coming from the ones that needed it most;
needed to see the real forms, needed to hear the real horns,
needed to define new ways that have yet to be born.
Because when you find yourself caught in the midst of stagnation,
you find there exists this thing called "imagination,"
the insight to listen when you're too timid to sing,
and the hammer to hold when you find the power to swing.
And those people that build their world out of human lab rats?
Well, they find out real quick that real people don't allow that.