Sleep now in the fire

/ August 17, 2016

Don’t worry, my dearies. Don’t fret. Sleep well.

Sleep with good thoughts of good things to come.

You will be well, live well, make money, have a nice home, a nice car, an open kitchen with countertops you enjoy feeling beneath your hands. These things are yours.

You will wear yoga pants and athletic tops, sunglasses, a dri-fit cap. You will ride bicycles and others will see your gear and be reminded of the professional sport of cycling.

You will insert your chip card into the reader and two officers who’ve seen their fellows killed by gunfire will appreciate their coffee credited to your account. You may experience tears, but the week will fade and feel like it never happened. You will walk in the park with a friend again before you have to be home for the kids who miss something but couldn’t tell you what.

Nothing has changed. Don’t worry whether anything has changed. Don’t. It hasn’t.

Sleep well, my dearies. Sleep now in the fire.

 

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32 thoughts on “Sleep now in the fire”

      • Just gave another re-read and Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd came to mind. Sometimes you really wonder if “there’s anyone out there?” This is easily broken up into a poem, too, Walt. One day I shall see it! Funny… you want to see me write more prose (right?) and I want to see you write poetry! Haha. It’s a draw. Either way, your writing is very lyrical and thought provoking, and I thoroughly enjoy it.

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  2. All of us who live in the West and benefit from capitalism are sleeping in the fire. It’s easier to enjoy all of the benefits our culture has to offer and not think to hard about the drawbacks. Guilty as charged. Cutting, inciteful – and a cracking song too. Chillingly written, Walt

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  3. Sounds like all the numb dopes who live in my quiet New Jersey suburb. This morning they’re upset at the new stricter penalties being imposed for using cell phones while driving. They say it’s government overreach and an infringement on their personal lifestyle.

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  8. You’ve just written a song, and while I don’t know if Zach in the boys would re-band to do it up fully, a boy can dream. I love Rage with the fiery hot intensity of a thousand exploding suns, I wish they would get back together.

    Don’t worry, nothing’s changed… where’s the fun in that, Walt? Where’s the fear and the existential crisis that forces us to reshape our world? Besides, if there’s no real strife, we can’t have real heroes rising to fix it, can we? And boy do we need our heroes! Anyway, I sleep well, and hope you do too, and I think you would make a wonderful songwriter.

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    • I tend to get on kicks where I rediscover things I used to be really into, like RATM. Been listening to them a lot lately and just remembering how we good we had it back in the early 90s, the last great era of rock. Man those guys were good. One of those examples of all the pieces coming together to create a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. Not that the parts weren’t great, too. Tom Morello, it should go with saying, is just one hell of a guitar player, and maybe more importantly one of the instrument’s greatest innovators. Audioslave kicked ass too, love me some Audioslave. Love pretty much anything Chris Cornell does, except for attempting to do the old Rage songs. That doesn’t seem to work to well for him. But Zack couldn’t do Cochise or I Am the Highway either, so its all good.

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      • I remember in school, the Battle of Los Angeles got me through an overnight really tough essay. It was brutally hard but the boys blazed me through it. Quintessential band.

        Walk – do you know the Tragically Hip? I have to ask.

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      • Tolkien got me through one of those. I wrote a paragraph, read a chapter of LOTR, smoked a cigarette, wrote another paragraph, read a chapter, smoked another cigarette, and so on until dawn.

        I know of the Tragically Hip. Like, I am aware of them as a band. But I’m afraid I don’t know their music.

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  9. Really cool song, never heard that one. Like the Trump posters for president in that one, and the brief footage from the WTO in Seattle, 1999. I went down there for that, left work in the afternoon thinking I wanted to be part of something ‘historic.’ I did see the singer from one of my favorite bands there at the time, called 764-HERO.
    Agree with you on the Chris Cornell comment too, though I only know his Soundgarden and solo material, but think he is one of the best rock singers EVER. This guy really kills it too. I avoided this 90s rock music mainly for some reason; I think it’s a dark spot in the last 30 years or so, the post-Grunge spin-offs. So glad to see you posting again though man! More, please — or do we have to wait until Halloween? Say it ain’t so. Bill

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    • Dark spot?! I must change your mind about this. I won’t be a nuisance about it, I promise. I will just contemplate it for a good long time, and try to come up with a way. It may not be possible. In fact, I’m going to go into it assuming it’s not possible, and be pleasantly surprised if I succeed.

      It’s funny. I’m really on a very big RATM nostalgia kick right now, and I’m consuming more of their stuff than I ever did back in the day, watching concert footage and interviews I’ve never seen before. Some of it is pretty recent, like within the last five or six years or so. But it ain’t got nothing on the stuff they did in the early 90s. Their approach to the music was so raw and angry and crisp and vibrant back then, it packed so much punch. Hard to replicate that 20 years later, when your in your 40s and probably pretty rich. Rock is for the young, by the young (and broke, or maybe hungry, maybe the same thing). Makes you young again. Not that I’m old, mind you. Not me.

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