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Survival Songs

by As We Were

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1.
They want you isolated, fearful jaded, torn apart separated. They want you, loveless overwhelmed, easy to buy, easy to sell, confused and overtaxed, too tired to fight back. Stifled voices, downcast eyes, our lives leave us drained, shut out from the inside. Three years, a fortress of steal. A gag of concrete and solitary confinement. A past in exile and a history gone. They want you broken and silent. A hierarchy of supposed protection and a chain of submission. We are taught that we trade our liberty for safety but they take more and more and give less and less. It’s in the air that we breathe and we don’t even notice, Punished for the crime of being human. Punished for the breaths that we take, for the crime of holding steady to the belief that a dignified existence of more important than the idea of a country. But in silence you are not alone, and when you scream you are not alone. We cry with the same voice, we bleed with the same hearts in the open or behind bars. Black blocks of discontent, a grand jury heaven sent, and the wreckage of our past, paves the way. A fifth amendment stripped in the process of our decay. Your silence in Seattle, and 18 fucking months to your shaved head in Aceh, sent to jail for despondent thoughts. But our risks are worth our wounds and they have no power to make us move, and as long as we remember that we won’t give up this anger We won’t make peace (with the pavement.) You may be gone but you are not alone.
2.
Blue Lights 01:16
How long has it been since you’ve trusted the dark and when was it broken? By a leering face? By a jeering voice? Please Please Please just let me go outside and feel something other than fear. The specters and warning, the silence in the air and the blue lights that never helped. Was it cutting words? Did your shadow blur? The punches and kicks, the twitches and ticks. Is it too much to ask to be able to take this back? We are taught to be afraid but I want you to have a dark night with no one in it and a walk alone without the fear of ghosts. Who took the night away? And every night do you see his face, when you open the door or when you look over your shoulder. I’m sorry for my brothers because we didn’t get to them quick enough to teach them any other way to act.
3.
You are not the voice of thunder, the howling of the whipping wind, not the will of mass redemption, but the damage done by the hands of sin. A logical mind stands completely drowned, just a distraction or a cowards reaction. Quick and sharp, you are called to act as the arm, while the body stays clean and unharmed. A decaying frame rebuilt with young flesh, they need more bodies they need more sweat. The recruiters lie, from twisted tongues of safe men who talk of protection but deal in deception. This is your way out if you don’t posses the brains, if you don’t posses the cash; this is your only option. (The bough is breaking, and the real cost of militaristic dreams cashes its death, come home retreat forever A handwritten letter) From the man in front of the gun. Locked eyes, our instructions, predisposed to fight and fight and lie. Men and woman all too human, become futures cast aside. Our lives brutish an short become statistics and names on a line. The tank blast, the missile strike, we need hearts to bleed and we need bigger knives. For god and for country is to serve and die, and I won’t step aside. We don’t need bigger knives.
4.
Defintions 03:25
I tore my body apart with definitions and signs of distinction. Gender roles, fucked up goals and misplaced homes of my feeling of strength and validation. But only to realize that I should never let the models of woman and man dictate who I am, or be beholden to the constraints of a role based hegimon. An embodiment of some misplaced truth or a standard that I should impale myself upon. The myth of normalcy is brutality against all those who stand apart and it’s not just an identity or an outlook but state of change and role destruction. Your stations that are so ingrained in you and so foreign to our lives. Your mistreatment and demoralization, your standards, your laws and stances, your heads filled with old hate and rust you, with the remnants of a loathsome and hate full past stuck you keep your fucking hands off us. Black and white, boy or girl, wrong or right, as seen through your eyes, as seen through your eyes. Because we could never live that way. I found a place in between masculine and feminine, above the traits I was given at birth and supposed granted staples of worth. Know that I am nothing you can define. Know that this flood doesn’t stop until all ideas that stipulate pre-determined subjugation to a roll or place in society are obliterated from our consciousness. So that every shade, of skin, every place of origin every body we were born to is but a part of our history that can neither be stripped from us or applied to us. So you better know that my blood is genderless.

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released May 1, 2013

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As We Were Burlington, Vermont

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