I was born the year he said he’d put an man on the moon,
Supersonic space oddity,
Tomorrow’s World coming soon,
From the Beatniks to Sputnik, Paris May ‘68,
United Nations and the Welfare State.
Germaine Greer, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King;
Who knew what the dream would bring?
A nuclear crisis led to his peace speech,
Marx was something you could still teach,
The revolution felt like it was still in reach.
But now all I hear is the long melancholy roar,
Of that dream receding down the beach.
It’s over, that’s the white cliffs of Dover,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night…
And by day?
Why there’s rising shares in arms stock,
Manifest Destiny’s got peace talks in an arms lock,
Social media keeps the truth blocked,
Everyone's going off half-cocked,
Captain's log:

"The fog of war is a smoke machine with a far right hand crank."
They're laughing all the way to the fog bank.
“Another sustainable war” says a military industrial think tank,
Whilst mothers are queuing at the food bank.

Am I a fool to think
We could step away from the brink?
Step away from the ledge.
Peering over the edge,
It's a long way down
But history's not a straight line;
It's a pandora’s box of lost and found.

I was born the year he said he’d put a man on the moon,
Supersonic space oddity,
Tomorrow’s World was coming soon,
Then: “Boom”
Shot by a goon,
Now we’re back in the war room
There’s an atmosphere of doom,
Must be that choir of oligarchs and oilmen all humming the same tune.
Can't see through the media smoke machine smoke screen gloom,
Can’t see past my smartphone
The fumes are filling up my headroom,
But there's no smoke without fire,
And Twitter is blazing in my bedroom,
Greta was right; the whole house is going up,
And still those bozos can't stop blowing each other up.
Freedom and victory has become a cluster bomb cluster fuck,
You can’t seek asylum while those lunatics are running amuck.

The war’s gone hot,
After decades in the cold,
I guess things fall apart,
The centre cannot hold...

Am I a fool to think
We could step away from the brink?
Is it all just talk?
To stop the car, get out and walk?
Plug the hole in the ozone
Rather than put a hole in the warzone.
To step away from the ledge.
To stop peering over the edge,
‘Cause it's a long way down
But history's not a straight line;
It's a box of lost and found.
"Look upon our works Ye Mighty,"
Will our truths remain profund?
Or just another lost age gone bye bye,
Long buried in the ground.