Canary blues

I need to ferret something out
I’ve been too mousy of late
Wearing a clothespin on my nose
To avoid smelling a rat
But that’s no way to live
Hiding my head full of dreaming
Like the ostrich
I’m sick of living with weasels
Or living as far away from them as possible
But I should have realized
They would send a mole
To listen in on my inner thoughts
Studying my fantasies of their demise
I never threw a molotov cocktail
Except in my dreams
In my conscious life I’m more like a chicken
I walk around staring at the world
Cock-eyed Bird-brained
Scratching for any little morsel of hope
Parroting the latest
Bullshit and adding to it
But where is my horse-sense?
My mother called it gumption
I don’t need a strategy or a map
I just need to get this damn saddle off my back
I need my mother’s gumption
And head for where the deer and the antelope play
Get out of snake city
Where no matter what the label says
Every can in the grocery aisle is a can of worms
I think I’m hearing the swan song
Of the two party system
The stock market is doing great by the way
But is this Dow Jones or Jonestown?
I think I’m binaried out
I think I shot myself in a duel
Or my shadow shot me
I refuse to be the canary
In this failed experiment of trickle down
I got tired of holding my cup out
So I just left it sitting in the cave
But no matter where I go
I am haunted by the plunk. . .plunk. . .plunk
Have you experienced that
Recurrent waking dream yet
Where you wake in a sweat
And all you can remember is
Perching in a cage
That is hanging by a thread
In a vertical tunnel and smelling gas
And thinking Wow I was a canary
That’s about as far as you can get
From a flying dream
Everyone wants a flying dream
Everyone wants to fly
Maybe someday
On some distant golden morning
After we have
Convinced the universe
That we want to be here
After we have convinced ourselves