Poetry

The Angst Still Rages

By TOM FULLER | Published: January 24, 2010

The angst still rages

‘Cross notebook pages
Where rhyming phrases
Bleed minds in cages
For ages, forever, til we’re hanging together
At the end of the tether
Lynched by apathy and told that we’re clever…
So hear the words that I’m spittin’ cos it’s now or never:

We all need something to hate
I hate SUVs, extra cheese, admin fees
CCTV, a life of ease, packs of three
What credit squeeze?
Get one free now and pay for it later,
Visa: our county’s great liberator
Fulla: hip hop’s great innovator
The creator, the middle-class soul elevator
I’ll murder your parents and children like a third-world dictator
And flay the skin from your bones like a medieval traitor
Leave you bloody and raw like a bad masturbator
So you gotta breathe with the aid of a hospital ventilator

Then I’ll break in later and switch off the machine
I’ll pump your lungs full of shit to make the world clean
There’ll be no one alive to hear you scream in your dreams
This ain’t a crime scene, it’s a temple to the obscene

It’s routine and it’s happening here in Australia
Another overdose on E’s not society’s failure
Responsibility for self-destructive behaviour
Rests with the individual concerned, and God can’t save ya.

Is your saviour a dead jew who’s crucified like a thief?
Or resurrected as a cow so you refuse to eat beef?
Or do you smoke ganja leaf for temporary relief
From a sanitised life and 80 channels of strife?
Or cut slits in your arm with a blunt kitchen knife?
Or beat your wife and go to church to sincerely confess?
Or strap bombs to your chest, and let God do the rest?

The imperial deathmarch stuck in my head
Not gonna stop till the streets run red
The nanny state’s been bled dry,
And millions dead. Try
To stop me
Like I said,
I’m fed
Up with the government controlling our lives
I’ll massacre priests to open your eyes to the lies

Buy a 30 year mortgage with fries on the side
Then wonder why nobody cries when you die
Your funeral notice an out of office reply
And then we’re out on the streets and the end is nigh.
On the endless plain before Baal most high
Six billion kneel to watch the black sun rise
Well fuck symbology and dead religion
I’ll stand on my own 2 feet and make my own decisions
Takin’ aim at ignorance with deadly precision
Put a bomb in the dole queue then escape from your prisons
I don’t fit in, I’m not a part of your system
Apathy and ignorance are never forgiven
In the revolution I’m livin’

As passive recipients of government welfare
We pay 40 per cent tax to subsidise blank stares
So crack whore mums get methadone off medicare
And tariff-protected industries survive the drought scare
So lower-middle-class marketing managers and self made millionaires
Are brought down to the same level by politicians who care
Only for votes and a seat as the chair
Of a committee for grants to hippies with long hair
Is that fair?

Why should I work hard and lose a third of what’s mine?
Stolen by the government but not called a crime
Fruits of my labour taken and distributed in line
With guidelines established by bureaucrats on flexi-time
I’m taking back what’s mine and if you stand in my way
I’ll kick ya down to the ground and whisper, I’ll say :
“You won’t disobey, so you been lead astray
By men in grey who spit cliché
And the illusion of a dream you pretend for today
But now your debts fall due and you have to repay
What you owe to my world for years of decay

You’ve sown the whirlwind, now reap the dread storm
Howling madness, babies stillborn, kiddy porn
Red blood on green lawns flows warm from a generation deformed
While faceless children bred to conform feed the machines that keep us warm
You’ve been warned, so heed the words that adorn
Ya walls: I’m here, the pale veneer of your stale career
Falls to expose black fear. I’m the modern Shakespeare,
The last frontier, a cold-eyed killer with my conscience clear

Real life ain’t like the movies, won’t be no apocalypse,
Four riders too busy watchin’ streaming video clips
But the countdown to oblivion’s already begun
And it won’t be the muslims with their bombs and their guns
And it won’t be a comet crashin’ into the sun
And it won’t be disease or poison or someAlien master race with phasers on “stun”
No, we’ve made our own Babylon
There’s nowhere to run.”