Nevermore

Driving down blistered severe

The rapacious maw of our despair

Black dog follows, strip club echoes

The raven’s shadow across the ghetto

Up the hill in an unmarked grave

The mother of American darkness lays

Liberty or death to start the battle

There’s nonesuch place for human chattel.

Hanging by a threat

Now you can choke on it

Hanging by a threat

So go and choke on it

This is a reckoning

You hear the ravens scream

Hanging by a threat

So go and choke on it.

Across the devil’s own half acre,

There’s rusted gallows for an angel

The ghosts that built this city scream

Of commerce and inhumanity

Cancer rides the freeway’s edge

Falling statues and cigarettes

Bullets whip the screaming kettle

As teargas cloaks the monumental.

Hanging by a threat

Now you can choke on it

Hanging by a threat

So go and choke on it

This is a reckoning

You hear the ravens scream

Hanging by a threat

So go and choke on it.

Chained beneath a parking lot

Savaged on the auction block

In antebellum geography

Rage, horror, history.

Nevermore.