There is a place where houses grow in rows
And the children sing and laugh like crows
or cubistic mushrooms, all pastels
Memorizing numbers in honeycomb cells.
To the beat of a heart they go or stay
Each baby vein ticks out a day
They eat copper and plastic pies
And they have never met the sky.
Their mamas always stay at home
Their daddies work, or drink, or roam
And sometimes there are screams in the night
When the naked drunks begin to fight
But the children know how to glaze their eyes
And they never learned quite how to cry.
They walk in lines and skip in lines
Play in lines and paint in lines
Drink the lines, eat the lines,
Breathe the, breathe the, breathe the lines.
What does it mean to run away?
Don’t think of it, they’re watching, they
Have machines that scan your brain
Keep you seen, keep you prey.
They’ve got faces like industrial knives
That know how to cut and slice
Jugular and hope alike.
Art is not prohibited here
And the children know it is right to fear
When they sleep alone at night
And shut their eyes so tight, so tight
And wait for a needle’s bite.