The Voice of the Ancestral Shrew
© 2007 Ron Perrone
Poem and  Music by Ron Perrone

This tune came about  after an accident involving a log splitter and my left hand. Unable to play guitar for a few weeks,
I wrote something that could be played on keyboard with one hand.
The poem is a few years old but this arrangement came about in less that 2 days.

So far, the feedback from folks has been universally "Huh? What the...?"

<<Play the tune>>

My dear Cenozoic children
It seems to me that, lately, you have been sleeping the day down.
Are you doing the right thing?
Or are your merely getting stoned
Off the smoke from a blazing empire in decline.

But I see that you have been counting the lights in the midnight concrete sky.
Those retinal flares that mark the
Accepted and civilized choice
For synaptic self immolation.


I trust that you have been evading the autoclave law
And its attendant reptillian sound bites on the scalp and throat.
As for myself, well, I have been hiding in a grey crevasse
Transcendant, on a landscape that is immutable.
A habitat safe for cows.


In the starless and Bible black of contempory annonimity
It would serve you well to seek those crepuscular haunts
For the last tangled ring of ageless limbs and roots.
For there stands the old guard, though weary and axe-bitten,
They are still holding the high ground.
Holding the clean sweet earth
And awaiting the onslaught finale.


For this is an honorable place as any to which you may aspire
When migration ends on a landscape rendered sterile,
Safe now for cows and for swine,
All basking and lowing,
Ah, sleek and unknowing,
Huddled in their thousand points of precious light.