Eighty-Six Thousand Four Hundred

Eighty-Six Thousand Four Hundred Iye! Another day And from the blink of sleep From the cosset of sheets The incessant alarm pulls my feet Iye! Another day And the sun has conveyed splintered shadows through the trees To dapple my wits with the even darker The broadside of purpose waking Twenty-four hours for repeating And strange it seems how beauty is lost Not one single enterprise to change belief The daily eating of my heart Numb and chilled through emptiness Iye! Another day Born with a slit throat and choked deliverance Hollow soul to hollow life Witness to nothing but splintered moment Silence Desperate quiet unreachable silence And so it seems this thin blood This weak and paltry empathy for fate This ritual of eighty-six thousand four hundred Iye! Another day For the isolation of movement to beckon And batter its tide on my dreams Only to transport another useless day To its inevitable conclusion I lay and shy with the predominant why Why should I For the courage and fortitude of ordinary people Is but control to the denizens of the animal political And my loneliness but a rumour to vacant ears And in the eighty-six thousand four hundred The speech of denial records that it has lost all faith in me Iye! Another day Another day to deserted hope Another day of discarded love Another day of futile intimacy To pull me from my cocoon of sleep And thirty one thousand five hundred and thirty six thousand For us to keep