Was walkin down an alleyway and darkness gathered round,
I spied a slicked down rebel and he looked me up and down.
He had the cut of one who’d slashed all ties with the old ways,
He looked at me like a rattlesnake appraising new found prey.

Suddenly he waved at me with something cold and black!
I turned around and I was face to face with a modern maniac!
His pistol whispered in my ear of burning funeral pyres,
And then he pulled the trigger!  But the weapon didn’t fire!

Chorus:
I’m standin on the city wall and I see war at hand
It won’t be some forsaken spot, it’s here in our homeland.
I blow the trumpet’s warning loud, this moment you must seize!
Cus violence is like VD it’s a sociable disease!

The man, he stepped back with a laugh that didn’t reach his eyes.
He said he was just practicing for the coming dark’s demise.
He said “This life is war, and you will learn that war is Hell.”
To hear him talk you’d never guess that we was all livin so well.

“World War 2 has never stopped!” he cried in desperation.
“This so called peace you hide behind has just been intermission!”  He said
“Shoot or be shot! Survival of the fittest, you ain’t got a choice!”
I might be wrong, but I think there was panic in his voice.

Chorus:

Then the man he walked away and left me on that street,
a vicarious participant in his desperate retreat.
I put aside all lesser things to face the alley’s mouth.
Somehow I knew it’d do no good to migrate further south.

Seven days went by before I saw that man again.
This time he was the newspaper’s hot front page specimen.
The headlines screamed into my eyes “MAN MURDERS SOCIALITE”
Then the column droned out horrors of that fateful night.

With loaded gun he’d followed a girl home from a restaurant.
Then he shoved her to the ground, his face twisted and gaunt!
He shot her in the back one time, she gave a piercing cry,
She sat up gasping–then she fell–in pain she bled and died!

I testified at the man’s trial to a room of fearful folk
I said “His act was one of hate–it’s time that you awoke!
And looked around, your affluence is but a dinosaur
Cus many here among us seem to think that life is war!”

Chorus:
And I’m standin on the city wall and I see war around me!
It ain’t in some forsaken spot, it’s here in my own family!
Battle lines are being drawn, you must prepare to fight,
For mercy, justice, love and truth…….

……or we’ll just fade into the night…….

(painting by Kristen Beck:  please support her however you can!)