Dark Matter – Dark Energy

An argument with some rhyming

PROLOGUE: A CHORUS OF SUSPECTED LIARS 

There’s just one hour before the end of Time,

and Truth at last is on trial for the crime

of deceiving those with propensities

to be self-aware sentient entities.

Ever since the known universe began

it’s bothered exoethicists and Man

that a concept as simple as “what is true?”

should be so persistently misconstrued.

Now, for the last few ticks of all that is,

those troubled by Wrong have a chance to quiz

each other on what was or was not right

till bad play is stopped by terminal light.

Thus, all those who claim or aspire to be powerful

get to be witnesses one last hourful;

everyone, no one, lives to judge the case,

where none will show mercy, none will find grace. 

The author’s tenuous premise 

In a universe which, on the whole, has self-consistent mathematical rules on how it must behave, a preposterous plot evolves.

It’s not especially more ludicrous than the bobbing quantum forces of inner space. And all this stuff has to end somehow. And how better to portray humanity at the end of time than with a dispute about truth?

Who’s to say that we, or some self-obsessed entity like us, might not leave behind the will, the mission, the instructions, and the code to invoke this finale, even after our own demise has become history?

Millennia of preparation presumably precede the denouement. A firm and coherent human purpose drives the enterprise.  It must do so, to justify such commitment of mind and matter, perhaps at a time when these two qualities are near or past exhaustion.

Perhaps it takes the co-operative spirit of the entire species, or the unbounded imagination of a tyrant. Perhaps an ideology greater than capitalism, and administrative genius more deft than justice itself.

The purpose might be a modest wish to celebrate life’s brief supremacy before it is eased aside in some slow evolutionary cataclysm. Or it might be the hubris of a victory parade in the thin imagining that something lasting has been achieved. It might be artificial consciousness or conscious-like.

But, no matter who puts on the show, or how or why, this is going to be the very last word in human communication. Finality relieved of fate. Destiny deferred by debate.

Ask yourself what would you do on learning that three million years of humanity and three billion years of DNA were about to be extinguished.

Erect a statue? or fill the space between the stars with conversation? 

Adam always comes first 

This is the quest for anti-doesn’t-matter,

the chronicle of human-no-ideas,

this is the Earth whose spin makes us flatter

this is Life at the first and last frontiers.

before the sun had ways to help trees grow,

before the dance that points to where bees go,

even in that distant thin beginning

before there was even sin or feeling,

before there was measure or scope and

locus, and when all there was was motion,

before any race or hatred of space ...

before the first breath, the touch, the embrace

of our species, before the first address,

was there ever more a case for caring less?

We’ve had eight thousand years to pay our debt;

now perhaps we can finally forget.

The Priest predates history

 We comprehend the Universal will,

thus we determine what is good and ill.

Aren’t you bound to us on Fate’s own quay?

In all this darkness, aren’t the only lights

the finding gleams of your desire to see?

did you aspire before we gave you fire,

did you illuminate truth before books?

do the planets, the sun and moon and stars

show you where to run and where you must look?

Don’t we keep fire and water, earth and air

in balance, don’t we control the meeting

and mating of inimical motions?

don’t we instruct which hearts will keep beating

don’t we face disease with curing notions?

We have, above all, the Word which endures,

we alone perceive how, and when, and why

we enforce our gods’ immutable laws.

and read in smoke the names of those who die.

The Priestess pesters in a whisper 

the breeze blows, the waves fold, the tide flows –

it’s the nature of the oceans;

the seed blows, the sun rolls, the sky glows,

in their time the flowers open.

The Philosopher drones 

I can save you from the tyrant secrecy

of priests who chained you with their mysteries,

denied your freedom and humanity

and subjugated you with power they

usurped from their imagined deities,

pummelling you with guilt and terror till

you hardly know what year or day it is.

Now here’s the deal: debate with me and steal

a world more wonderful, more complex, rare

than you have ever been allowed to dream

and fumble through; inhale the mountain air

of understanding, plunder jungled streams

and scale your sea-cliff promontory ideals;

here’s more: this knowledge is for all to share.

At last you’re free to question what you should

believe – which is floor and which is ceiling,

What’s so good that we must follow feelings

when so few people who can feel, feel good.

It’s human truths that humans must confess:

as time goes on, we meet God less and less.

The Sceptic lisps 

philosophers at first

were men with eyes to see;

they spoke and mystery

receded like forests;

now thinking’s just for fun,

philosophy is dead;

the joined up job is done:

what we need, now reason’s

clearly out of season,

is clarity instead.

technologists seize power

from the gods, science blinds

us with elucidation,

brains crash and cower;

and He finds, and She minds

there is no obligation –

only motives, things destroyed,

pretexts and banality,

mutual co-ordinates

that take their fix in a void

of godless neutrality. 

The Academic wrote a tome

We’ve read all the books, we’ve got the knowledge;

Everything you need you’ll find in college.

When communism fell, it was our part

to write Marx out of history and art.

Our reading kept the Truth awake all night

while sly priests aspired to negotiate

their price with God, while civil servants slumbered

in coffins with the past, while poets wondered,

and politicians merely used their might

and lies to be heard and seen to be right.

Ignorance is death. There’s an epidemic.

Trust me. I’m a well-known academic 

The Devil’s Advocate acts as a management advisor 

You academics surely can’t pretend

it’s facts that fix and fascinate you when

a swift examination is enough

to show you’ve filled a pillow case with fluff.

It isn’t understanding that you chase

but a paltry powder puff of praise –

mere confirmation. It’s intent, not proof

you drool for, expectation, not the truth. 

The Anthropologist can’t apologise 

Every generation throws a saviour

up the pop chart; all the people crave for

some new Jesus, so the papers make

and milk a hundred heroes every week –

thus being God and being good at lies

may be identical; but being wise

is reading books that no one else has read,

and wiser still is writing what they said.

The weight of references alone attests

to erudition, evidence, success.

The Student spews

All hail, high table radicals,

it’s time to be veridical

at last; research on your own piss

and crap must end – it’s come to this.

You’ve steamed too long in academia,

couldn’t be more weird or seamier,

driving aimlessly like Daimlers

writing trite polite disclaimers

framed in quaint and ancient phrases

(set to “stun or maim” on phazers).

You only tolerate dissent

because you’ve lost the argument,

never tried to climb the Blorenge,

never found a rhyme for “orange”.

We shouldn’t care you’ve gone to seed –

you had your best ideas on weed;

they could have divvied out the jobs

by seeking out the biggest knobs.

Who else but you could give a fart

for what’s more cool, science? art?

Your rules are distance and disdain,

so every bat and ball and chain

is yours to name and taint and claim:

you’re still at school, you’re all the same.

CHORUS 

The priests and poets and their acolytes

pass observations off as prophecy,

pretend their sick inanities bring blights,

and warn: to contradict is heresy. 

The Documentary Producer uses rhetoric and visuals 

Before me are the leaves of a still unopened book.

Did they even rustle when the tree of knowledge shook?

The Poet takes refuge in distance 

dimlit and diminutive

far off landscape figures live,

and roll and spin with the thrill

of being, immense as hills.

(It’s hard to make couplets that scan and rhyme

if life’s just a knot on the ribbon of time.) 

The Novelist seeks praise and immortality 

In the wrong order

I first started getting things

in the dark when I brought a

few lives to life that couldn’t sing.

Prose is a long and cold goodbye

on the frozen tundra: so

long as I live, my body

will always melt some snow.

More risky, more ballistic

once, my new work grows broader:

language, though I leave it brick,

was unexploded mortar.

Surely creativity’s

not change, not running water:

it’s the world I think I see

(not getting bits in order). 

The Retired General begins his memoir 

I first started getting things in the wrong order

when I moved a few lines in the dark across the border

The Scriptwriter refuses to work with animals

Surely, friends, a work as multi-layered

as mine, proves I’m no deluded bayard.

The Marxist Critic obfuscates 

On the edge of revolution,

what does it mean to hold one’s breath,

or to escape the Bomb, avoid

disaster brought by asteroid,

to live through Ecodoom or Plague

when “tragedy” becomes some vague

idea of any sudden death?

On the edge of revolution

it’s some late drunk that Macbeth contemplates

as Hamlet amputates the arse of state;

the crazy Oedipean despot squints

in bloody darkness while the whole world shrinks.

Tragedy is dead not because we’ve spent

all our powerful, mad and flawed old men,

but now there are so many in our saga

no one gives a toss they’ve all gone gaga.

On the edge of revolution

Lenin waits, even Lennon vacillates,

old Lear loses power, Hamlet seems to flake;

each one cuts out, they can’t rewire their times

and though historians and clerics strive for

that something and nothing they have to die for,

it’s regimes which win that define their crimes.

Heroes who once were the enemies of states

today take enemas, and stay up late.

The first Columnist criticises critics 

While Hitler executed Jews,

art, claimed Levis, would make you better.

And though, today, we’re free to choose,

we still believe in Men of Letters.

Critics make art so precious that

it has to be locked up in vaults;

so what if the artist’s a prat

prone to anachronistic faults?

They make art so hard that it’s worth

more than diamonds, more than cities;

they make art so old it dates the earth:

when you’re senile you’ll know what it is.

The Fifth Columnist twists the knife 

The CIA once funded left wing art

(which no one liked) to make the Commies smart.

The Russians thought its decadence corrupting,

but somehow never found it too disrupting –

and that’s a lot more flattering to Russians

than to the White House, art or Western fashion.

While artists pick the universe apart

the critics take the same approach with art,

lapse by sorry lapse, and scrap by scrap:

it’s hard to say who ends up with more crap.

The Naturalist is the better poet 

anemonies and celandines subside:

enchanters nightshade, columbine reply;

on dead and dying trees a shrill green moss

sinks tendrilled life into their sense of loss;

forgetmenots swim in ineffable blue,

overwhelm art with the shock of the true.  

CHORUS 

Soft fleshy art lacks a safer carapace

and soon retreats to some warm orifice. 

The Banker speaks through his gold teeth 

Without me there’s no wealth to work your art,

no vulture sculpts and vats you in formaldehyde,

no farthing farting scientist is siphoning for funds

no safehouse hedonist where economists can hide,

no grasswit scribbling scholars, no softarsed academics,

or louse-lipped lecturers are loosed to mug the young,

paid in perpetuity for nought but plain bogpaper thought.

I made your mouthwash jobs, each one; it was me:

all your pigtrough politicians and your papermen,

all your pinko TV punks, your cheating preachers,

all the titsure teachers, and your tacky actors

every cheesy chartshow flop and every chatshow geisha,

they are all my mint, my softspoken monetary tokens.

I am all you need to know, I am all you need. 

The Businessman trades truths 

If you won’t give me privilege I’ll buy it –

what you won’t sell I’ll take, and not deny it.

I’m the gambler – it’s not your job to risk it;

I also have my coffee with a biscuit.

If power’s not the means, then it’s the end;

you’re my competition if you’re not my friend.

The Explorer goes without a word 

The Astronomer adds a new dimension 

I’ve found more space than you could ever need

between the stars: yet you fill it with greed.

and no one takes responsibility

for drowning people living by the sea,

while medical executives wear shades

to make them immune to Africa’s AIDS.

Do you really think your ethics can choose

which science to refute and which to use?

We track back truth to visions in our dreams

and sleep between these two computer screens:

the world treats science like a sci-fi tract

and science fiction is believed as fact. 

The Mathematician sums it up 

Science must not be merely led about

by conviction where there’s evidence,

nor by assertion when it faces doubt;

you start from certainty, we from ignorance;

you begin with answers, we follow quests.

And so it is that by degrees physicists

unfreeze the structure of the universe

and release, like the mammoth from the ice,

patterns of matter and life, that are fanned

in the slow air flow of what we understand.

But that’s too bland for men in Western suits

fast-fed for centuries on absolutes.

As resolution grows beneath the lens

your resolution drives us to find ends,

and in your disappointment you rebel,

damning white coats for what they can’t reveal.

We give you mathematics to judge risk,

and you turn data into magic tricks;

you hide in bed manipulating odds

like aged hippies who protest at Death,

insisting we’re immortal like the gods

while dreading all you eat and drink and breath.

The Judge misdirects the jury 

You know that it’s against the law to fight:

so it must be wrong to bruise and brawl for right.

CHORUS

The choice is yours, old friends: to prove in sooth

you’re right, or take a chance and tell the truth. 

The Candidate stands and rants 

The colleges who brand and package youth

for so-called useful life take these uncouth

TV-span minds, and turn out planed-down whimps

with scant IQs that barely rival chimps.

No one here takes responsibility:

if you’re lost and confused then vote for me.

My virtue is knowing who is to blame;

my enemy’s flaw is thinking the same.

The world which cars have made so alarming

has nothing to learn from traffic calming.

You may believe that journalists are shit

but teachers are below them in the Pit.

Etcetera …

Ate tessera …

Ed said tara …

The Former Minister is motivated by idealism 

I too imagined a better place,

and now I live there in disgrace. 

The Pacifist persists 

No, teachers aren’t the ones who kill and maim:

The state owns Truth, and what’s done in our name.

Some heady time after 1939

we learned to make warfare safe and benign:

Why fear the cost if we keep our wars short?

Why grimly endure what we could export?

Then if our brave peace-keeping comes undone

we can just call it quits and go back home,

and while it’s our duty to roundly condemn

other warmonger states, we’re not like them.

There’s often no need to send our own troops;

it’s not hard to find miscreant groups

driven to madness by disaffection

or armies suffering insurrection:
we can reach them all with very long arms –

and they pay us, so we come to no harm.

We sell technology, not the squaddies:

our customers abroad provide the bodies.

Knowledge is the power we communicate;

that’s how we have remained immune to date.

We who are blessed with imagination

can focus on a world in conflagration

with painful shadowless light, slow and stark,

that opens blind corners, peels back the dark.

We can choose to hold hands with Africans

dieing of AIDS; we can stare hurricane

wars in the eye, we can walk among tombs

before the videophone shows the bombs,

before the bones of towns and homes are snapped.

We can trace faces melting off girls trapped

and burned in their huts by the enflamed mob,

and watch inconsolable mothers sob

for children starved in their Asian village,

while desultory rebel soldiers pillage

in excruciating slowed down motion.

We study torture and execution,

murderous screams and terrified pauses

crafted by the liberating forces.

Dead women have their tits and twats cut out;

live children, hiding, ask what that’s about.

We can even see through this blood-red sea

to the stony heart of our humanity

this horror is not death, but its rival:

life on the border we call “survival”.

So I predict a time when we’ll be cursed

for doing nothing, and for doing worst.

The MPs contract mumps 

The Sunday papers explode like salvos

in remote maniacal market squares,

splintering us with their sharp-edged egos,

and splattering gore and random despair. 

The News Journalist is gratuitously contentious 

We broadcast truth on every hour

as it happens – what’s now – what’s new:

don’t blame us that all you devour

must be more live more real more true. 

The Civil Servant crystallises 

It’s not how far the Government will go,

but how long they stay around to listen.

We tell them everything they want to know,

if they ask; they’ll never know what’s missing.

CHORUS 

The politicians and their acolytes

pass observations off as prophecy:

each slick inanity spits sound bites

and every contradiction’s heresy. 

The Social Reformer loses heart 

Our leaders manage the quest for excess

better than the stress of those who have less.

So stone mausoleums thrive,

dead museums all survive:

when I’m feeling most alive

stinking refuse trucks arrive,

dump their shit across my drive.

The Conspiracy Theorist expresses doubts 

You have to be grown up to see

the truth of Their conspiracy;

the oldest man on earth alive

will find there’s nothing left to hide,

and this is what it means to lose:

there’s no hope till we introduce

education; till then we’ll beat

the kids to school to learn defeat.

The Feminist asks a different question 

Well, someone has to tell Jack Kennedy

he’s sure to win a war of mutual

destruction. So who gives him this remedy?

Whose sophistry inspires the brutal will

to take us to the brink? Does his wife confide

she thinks he’s lied? Does she kiss him goodbye?

The Teacher marks time 

The cockroaches of state are picking scraps with neighbours:

Everywhere we hear them scuttling, and rustling papers:

papers prioritise, promise and plead

papers are white and neutral and read

papers are rough, pale, weak, thin, and grey

papers are green, and have had their day.

papers make progress, and plans and points

papers can roll reputations and joints.

papers propose and finalise deals

papers are taken to cure your ills

papers are proof, they refute, they refuse

papers are background and comment and news.

papers keep secrets, make peace and give warnings

papers are Sundays and evenings and mornings

papers make handkerchiefs, jackets and pants

papers fake aeroplanes, tigers and plants

papers are fiction, unfounded and void

papers are Darwin, Einstein and Freud.

papers give prizes, and hope, and chase

papers may patronise novels and plays

papers take shape and paint and shade

papers may rain on or hail your parade.

papers are beds for tramps, and sheets

papers are wrapping, and packing for cheats

papers enlighten, transcend and debunk

papers are banks and ubiquitous junk.

papers fill gutters and hearts with desires

papers start wars and next day’s fires

papers test children, then wipe your arse

papers know better than you who you are.

The Nursery Nurse provides the warning 

Today no one dares ignore the warning:

The ice is always too thin for skating, dear;

It’s something to do with global warming

and parents who cripple their kids with fear.

The Environmentalist recycles the past 

Bracken storms back across the moor,

its lifestyle treats the soil with scorn:

each year the greens succeed the browns

distinguishing the hills from towns.

Then a chain of summer droughts

shackles our mortality with doubts

and takes the state and science unawares,

while the crispened landscape thins and tears.

So, before we could purchase health

before they made us vote for wealth

before the People took a stand

before the barons scorched the land

before the fields returned to weeds

before the earth’s rebirth in seeds

before the storm and silent rain

before we were immune to pain

before this death and effluence

before this insignificance

before we gave way to disease

before our hearts were forced to freeze

before the fire that brought the trouble

before the bombs that laid the rubble,

we were lost already in our greed

with appetites we couldn’t feed,

landscapes scummed with stench and tears

and desperation no one hears;

before we could afford good health

before they let us vote for wealth

before the workers took a stand

when warfare rolled across the land

we came to dig with death and dearth

and learned to milk not mill the earth.

Like Dark Matter in the well of space

we have no place no form no face.

CHORUS 

If everything we put together

is bound to fall apart,

the only things to last forever

are those which never start. 

The Zoologist becomes animated 

We’re so smug in two earthbound dimensions

while insects, fish and birds without pretensions –

even monkeys, whales – are designed and free

like bats and balls to bounce about in three.

The Exobiologist has

nothing human left to say, alas,

except

              Can we still be the norm

if life takes on some other form?

The Geometrician makes a fine point on another plane 

If I can be of service:

truth is found in a line or surface

constituted, as we must define,

by all positions

of a point or line

satisfying the given conditions. 

The psychologist demonstrates relative truth 

This brain scribbles wildly on its doodlepad

in the nanosecond Now – it draws a mad

face, maybe beautiful or menacing.

Though images rarely mean anything.

This brain programs a software engineer

whose childlike mind gives him the idea

our species is doomed, and dire exigence

demands artificial intelligence.

He builds a machine for automatic

world government that runs in his attic,

and all’s well till the code that deals with Terror

suffers a terminal blue screen error.

This brain is a mild psychotherapist’s

which reasons with vile trial and error priests;

it paints a woman’s smile on his veranda:

he wants her, though he’ll never understand her.

This fish brain decays and bursts if the seas

warm up by just a couple of degrees.

This man goes crazy if love is denied:

this human brain knows when someone has lied.

The Homeopath gives an alternative diagnosis 

Lies can put your eyes out

lies can stop your heart

lies will put your “I”s out

lies will burn your art. 

The Chatshow Guest recalls what she had for breakfast 

Experience is vivid, it persists

in every detail, shrieks with distinction

till it’s gone; then, like death, nothing exists,

and memory confirms our extinction.

CHORUS 

In tribute to insightful Man

who thinks he is because he thinks,

the universe, which must expand,

first studies what we’ve done, then shrinks. 

The Alzheimer Sufferer remembers: 

if only you knew

how much

all of you

drift in and out of my touch

The Blue Sky Thinker, pausing for a moment, blinks 

Imagine

Just imagine.

The Forecaster reports the view from space 

we measure the slow march of clouds of clouds

across the sky;

in all the ancient kingdoms modern crowds

are poised to occupy. 

The Man on the Park Bench opens his eyes 

Mankind which is made out of stardust and made it to Mars

is held not by vision but physics from reaching the stars.

We who live at that point in time and space

where we can surmise from our little place

the first infinitesimal, the spin

of strings and music of the spheres within,

their folded up dimensions, ants on wire,

the unity to which all things aspire –

we whose lives are gone sooner than the blink

of stars can weigh the universe and link

its origins and end, and then converse

on bubbles in our beerglass multiverse –

we, who will never see such things, can dream,

and calculate beyond the way they seem.

I sit beneath an autumn tree

and read no ambiguity

in a simple fall from life to death;

and yet, its cool complexity

still touches me, fills me with breath.

The Foreigner describes how it happens 

It was a dark day when we heard the news

that the last ray of sunlight was to fall;

no one would escape, everyone was bruised

by its shadow, we stumbled under its pall –

it seemed as if time itself had turned sour.

Though we had plentiful supplies of dried

fruit, frozen beans and nuclear power,

politicians thought it best they should lie;

and yet, this end was so clear no one missed

its intent, so perfect we could see as one,

so fine and final we could not resist.

So how could we say so long to our sun?

Just once maybe in this three million years

there’s a time for us to come together

to pool despair and fear and thereby share

with friends the truth that nothing is forever.

Science confirmed what the shaman foretold:

they plotted the point where last beams would play,

and fixed upon a land lost, mean, weak, cold –

Earth’s darkest, least significant place.

Rich nations protested, fearing the loss

of fabulous commercial potential

if desert nomads on the permafrost

had preference over residential

sites elsewhere. At first they asked for data

updates, and later tried to slow time’s course;

(their divisive ploys were all non starters,

though they excited incidental wars).

Aid arrived to “save the environment”

and media men offered gold for sand

to people who didn’t hold with government

or entertain the ownership of land.

The sightseers travelled from Everyplace,

on foot, on faith, some angel-like on wings,

proud people of allcultures, anyrace,

holding their homelands high like kites on strings,

to reach this wide-skied designated space,

an arid half-lost peneplain where cloud

and colour came in air-brushed blues and greys,

and artificial light was disallowed.

It was winter then, and not a grass blade

grew on that vast concrete cast of land

which tireless ice and wind and time degrade

where glinting High Sierras used to stand.

The plateau flowed with eager refugees

who had abandoned greed and vanity:

millions poured like tidal estuaries,

a confluence of churned humanity.

For months they gathered while the sky sank low

and thin and dim, till in the final days

noon fell with just a rusted orange glow,

corroding Earth with horizontal rays 

and leaving shapes free of texture and depth

where light picked out a terse one-sided mound

of earth and rare plant husks survived in death

among the seething human crush for ground.

Strange shadowshows stripped the familiar

as faltering beams flickered, warm and cold,

like the spinning dance of psychedelia,

and briefly then the plain transformed to gold.

The air breathed in, all motion seemed to ache:

it might have been on windless Moon-dust seas

or dark Europa’s frozen surface lake

where one last ray would stray then stay then cease.

Suddenly its light glanced a mushroom form –

a fruit too rare to have a human name –

and released into the amber night a storm

of spores, each one star-like to shine the same.

In that moment 10 billion people saw

perfection in each minute golden sphere,

in the structured purpose of every spore

drifting out to found new mitocondria,

nurtured by the planet’s cavernous dark;

they left spectators awed in speculation,

sunless, starless, yet free to spark

and feel their ways back home in expectation.

The Citizen explains how it feels 

There’s a clock in a room in a bag in a box

which sets off an alarm each day at six.

Most likely some time the battery will die;

we could predict the sound slowly to decay,

to fade, and one day stop – not with a start,

but like two people who have come apart,

noiselessly, no longer dependable.

Other tones continue, bland, eventful,

and this has been an issue of such obscure

consequence that no one will be aware.

But, say our expectations are confounded.

What if the alarm is still being sounded

like clockwork each day, a kind of muzac

that sooths ordinary fears and proves that

hope is near, unheard and so unheavenly?

What if awareness breathes less evenly

and sometimes, rarely, we are reassured

by a thin urgent call beyond a door,

just enough to imply that it persists still?

Then we could imagine, if we chose, a shrill

electronic insistence, unceasing,

more irrevocable than hearts beating.

In our age, in ill health, in the neglect

that follows our death, we come to expect

a future in its pulse, its monotone.

Long after the house founders, walls come down

and that room vanishes, long after scanned

magnetic imprints of two holding hands

are erased from the stones, and molecules

rearrange, long after our species rules,

a beacon remains that seems to define

a “Creator”, something here once alive.

Thus our race strains to hear the sound: priests pray,

science stares into space. We calculate,

estimate, while we know we cannot know;

together we will this thing to be so.

Like two people who do not come apart

this is the end from which we all start.

CHORUS 

Let’s say life’s a tale spun by a deaf old man

continuously awaking from a dream.  

The Misanthropist has the last word 

Since no witness here may speak more than once,

once you close your mouths you’re all worthless scrunts.

June 2004/May 2009