18/7
I took the elevator up to the 23rd floor, but nobody lives there at all.
It's a place made from pencils and fluorescent lights, two people who pass in the hall.
A place for small men, and one simple dream; taped, filed, and rotting away.
I remind myself softly, "I'm a visitor here" but these Lifers have chosen to stay.
Why would you trade your freedom for boredom, your thoughts for a binder of rules?
What is the point of a life lived in limbo, in a hell full of Paper and Fooles?
Well:
We've got charts to explain it -- why we're behind schedule--
Charts! charts! and the colors are grand.
I hear in accounting they've got a new printer!
Engineering's got them a brass band!
{ Could be steel though, or plastic, -- you never can tell -- hey, with them it might be sleight-of-hand. }
Word around six is they fired Old Wenzel
"We loved him!" Did you know him at all?
We toast him at seven, by eight he's forgotten,
One by one, you know they'd all fall ...
Could it be dumb luck I escaped it? The meetings the boredom, the grind?
It's frankly too awful to face it -- the slow dissolution of mind.
I wonder about them, every so often, wonder who and what they became.
It's like reincarnation, this thing that I've done here: I remember, but it's not quite the same.
Then:
Tubes give way to transistors, transistors to VLSI.
'Cause faster is smaller and smaller is better but I never stopped to ask why?
Machines to make you feel wanted
Machines to make you loved
Machines to make you feel close to someone
Machines that fit like a glove.
We have all the time in the world, love, all the time that there is.
but when you count nanoseconds to minutes, champagne kinda loses it's fizz.
So:
I'll send you a TXT to check Facebook,
Email you a poem you won't read
I'll call or I'll FAX, or some other hack,
Something to cut through the weeds...
There's something real about this Art of Creation.
Nice gig, but the travel's insane.
So I'll send you a postcard from nowhere,
'cause nowhere's in style again.
And:
I've long since left Corporations
they can have it, I'm not going back.
I'll keep my place in Phuket, though.
(and a few patents to add to my stack)
There's no way I'll ever retire.
I mean what the hell would I do?
I'd rather be alive and on fire.
... and writing a few things for you.
Copyright @ 2013 Greg Richter / IFR Music
