But the writing is on the wall! Cried the fresh cut to the old Wound still bleeding As if he didn't know As if he hadn't done his fair share of reading Like he'd never felt the flames of revolution The young man's simple solution Peter out time and time again Like he never spotted revolution's hole before the end And the writing on the wall? That impotent echo of inertia unmasked The writing on the wall that really matters Is in the Jewish quarter under bulletproof glass It holds a lost family's past the top will fight to be forgotten This whole fucking city's rotten to the core But it's you, and it's me It's the woman heavy with child Screaming please! from the doorway She clutches her belly as triage sets in When the night street sweeper lets her choose which one of her children It's the jacked up jackboot with his foot on the neck of the pale girl, the frail girl Dimming the light in the only eyes Bright enough to see a pattern through the cracks This lonely boy chewed up and swallowed by streets, spit, famine and rats It's the words of the last librarian The only man among us with enough courage and true grit To save our knowledge from the fires we lit When he burst, arms full, from the blaze One proud voice in the panic He called out Son, if you're going to cry then cry havoc! It's the neighbourhood pill pusher, a family man It's our weakness It's our strength We are the very fingertips of life's outstretched hand But you'll find no spark in the sandstone dark Because what the holy men won't preach Is that the one thing that unites us is reach We reach forward And there aren't enough songs in the world Not enough words in my tongue Nor enough breath in my lungs There is no echo that has lasted so long No shadow that has stretched so far as we We reach forward And it's safe hands back down the line In the endless chain Not lost, never lost, when the strength That we gained from their giving remains We reach for the echo We reach forward For the moment between waking and sleep For the sum not some of us Together we leap And yet we eat enough stone That hard hearts hide a home Under promise, understanding Under children's skin and bone And the writing on the wall you love Was hand-penned by the censor! So spit in the Cannon's Mouth! And tell 'em ink sent you!