Elegy with Zombies for Life by Terrance Hayes Lyrics
The trouble with living like thinking is feeling is it's not
Really living. I think, for example, these are good times
Save the mornings I want to say "Shame on you mother-
Fuckers" to the motherfuckers trafficking homemade posters
Of death on the corner between my home and the cemetry
That holds among its dead the bones of the great pianist
Mary Lou Williams, the mother of jazz. Music was her child
Because she had no child. For Mother's Day my children
And I took my wife to visit Mary Lou's headstone (May 8, 1910-
May 28, 1981). We found it unmoored and untended,
Unattended on a hillside. People who say don't live in the past
Don't have a real sense of the past, would you agree with that?
Life is not about what you learn, really, but what you remember.
I was in a diner once when I saw a young mother passed out
With her face in her plate. I have been thinking about the horrified
Expression of her little boy as a waiter approached the booth
Near me a lady in a business suit sighed, "For that kind
Of woman, abortion should be free. "Think about the theory
That crime rates have declined since Roe versus Wade versus
The theory that sexually transmitted diseases have increased
Think about identity versus ideology versus idiocy, the Center
For Bio-Ethical Reform versus the sinners of the bio-unethically
Formed. The Center for Life and Hope versus the Center for Death
And Despair. Because thinking is feeling, I think about death
All the time. the food under my nails, the nails underfoot,
The skulls sockets packed with dirt. Maybe the soul is tethered
To the body like an embryo even when the body is no longer alive.
Maybe zombies have taken over. Are you for the Humans for Life,
The Families for Life,the Armed Forces for Life, or are you for
Something else? Because thinking is feeling, there are thousands
Of compartments and pigeonholes in my brain, there are polemics
And porn flicks and utopian blueprints, court briefs, sketches
Graphs, philosophical theories like "Cruelty is a form of laziness,"
But there is only one version of death. It take work to imagine
The ineffable, which I think is the word for something that can't be
Effed up. I think the sanctimonious are worse than people who hate
Music, would you agree with that? At this very moment, they are fighting
about the order of things we should value: God, Family, Country-
No: Love, Justice, Money. I can no longer grasp the logic
Of conflicts. In the pro-life versus pro-choice debate, for instance,
It's the versus that's of interest to me. Remember Fred Williamson
Saying to the friend who became his enemy at the end of Bucktown,
"I don't want to kill you, I just want to beat the hell out of you"?
I love the lovely restraint that. Cruelty is pretty damn lazy, actually.
It takes more effort to earn someone's love than it does to punch
Someone in the face. May you be punched in the face, may you weep
Until your nose is fat and crumpled as the hood of a child's raincoat,
That's my curse for the self-righteous. That's the "Thug life for life"
In me, a former self versus a self who wants to change, Cassius Clay
Versus Muhammed Ali, who said, "A man who views the the world
The same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life."
The trouble with thinking thinking is feeling is sometimes
There is no feeling. Twenty years ago I would not have believed
My unborn child would still be here pushing a cry out of me.
Really living. I think, for example, these are good times
Save the mornings I want to say "Shame on you mother-
Fuckers" to the motherfuckers trafficking homemade posters
Of death on the corner between my home and the cemetry
That holds among its dead the bones of the great pianist
Mary Lou Williams, the mother of jazz. Music was her child
Because she had no child. For Mother's Day my children
And I took my wife to visit Mary Lou's headstone (May 8, 1910-
May 28, 1981). We found it unmoored and untended,
Unattended on a hillside. People who say don't live in the past
Don't have a real sense of the past, would you agree with that?
Life is not about what you learn, really, but what you remember.
I was in a diner once when I saw a young mother passed out
With her face in her plate. I have been thinking about the horrified
Expression of her little boy as a waiter approached the booth
Near me a lady in a business suit sighed, "For that kind
Of woman, abortion should be free. "Think about the theory
That crime rates have declined since Roe versus Wade versus
The theory that sexually transmitted diseases have increased
Think about identity versus ideology versus idiocy, the Center
For Bio-Ethical Reform versus the sinners of the bio-unethically
Formed. The Center for Life and Hope versus the Center for Death
And Despair. Because thinking is feeling, I think about death
All the time. the food under my nails, the nails underfoot,
The skulls sockets packed with dirt. Maybe the soul is tethered
To the body like an embryo even when the body is no longer alive.
Maybe zombies have taken over. Are you for the Humans for Life,
The Families for Life,the Armed Forces for Life, or are you for
Something else? Because thinking is feeling, there are thousands
Of compartments and pigeonholes in my brain, there are polemics
And porn flicks and utopian blueprints, court briefs, sketches
Graphs, philosophical theories like "Cruelty is a form of laziness,"
But there is only one version of death. It take work to imagine
The ineffable, which I think is the word for something that can't be
Effed up. I think the sanctimonious are worse than people who hate
Music, would you agree with that? At this very moment, they are fighting
about the order of things we should value: God, Family, Country-
No: Love, Justice, Money. I can no longer grasp the logic
Of conflicts. In the pro-life versus pro-choice debate, for instance,
It's the versus that's of interest to me. Remember Fred Williamson
Saying to the friend who became his enemy at the end of Bucktown,
"I don't want to kill you, I just want to beat the hell out of you"?
I love the lovely restraint that. Cruelty is pretty damn lazy, actually.
It takes more effort to earn someone's love than it does to punch
Someone in the face. May you be punched in the face, may you weep
Until your nose is fat and crumpled as the hood of a child's raincoat,
That's my curse for the self-righteous. That's the "Thug life for life"
In me, a former self versus a self who wants to change, Cassius Clay
Versus Muhammed Ali, who said, "A man who views the the world
The same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life."
The trouble with thinking thinking is feeling is sometimes
There is no feeling. Twenty years ago I would not have believed
My unborn child would still be here pushing a cry out of me.