Carrots & Sticks

Words bounce freely through the wind of fragile plans Between a choir of linguistic pirates with sweet and sticky hands Room service, lip service, here are our demands They use them as shelters, they wear them as skin To stand hollow and sing out, "we're with you, my friend" Coup d'etat concepts, commandeer definitions The crass and crude tools are a thing of the past No mess, no spectacle, just tightropes and gas Cha-ching, bang, boomerang! - it's comin' round fast See the paper princes and the empires by pen Fine print dynasties pressure cooking men The fuel is desperation and the match is "sign, my friend" And hot potato - it's revolution! Can't slow down or it's back to square one No striking deals or it's carrots and sticks Hot-air promises and party tricks Walking high above our heads it's suits on stilts Tying Mother down, letting strugglin' flowers wilt - Now send in the jackals, topple everything they built We're gonna need every instrument in Music, magic, and that good old medicine No fetish for permanence, no more paper chasers We'll dig our hands into the Earth and eat the fruits of our labor Sound the strike-callin', mudrakin', whistleblowin' watchdogs The masquerade is over, can't impose order on fog Good for you ain't good for us, oust the half truth hogs - Or else! They'll give you a ladder and kick out the posts And say come on sheriff, lay off the skyscraper scapegoats We're all out of great whites but we still got grey hopes No joke, shows young folk how to limp with style and not mope They know there's a pie but they don't know what kind it is They know it's in the sky but they don't know how high it is I'm not buying it, nobody's finding it They're trying and failing by the five and dime with it So, onward and upward, reach for it, man Just work a little harder, on tippy-toes you stand Through a series of mirrors, it seems so close to your hand Yes, onward and upward, keep reaching, my friend No destination No certainty No prize And no end.