The Naked Ape in the Human Zoo

 

         Let me give my fellow species something to contemplate

These great big babies with fist sized brains

Like our bodies don’t share the same metabolic rate

Our minds aren’t growing at an equal pace

I care little whether you’re buying real estate or live in Section Eight

Whether or not you procreate or have a pretty face

It’s all about your mental state

 

I care about your convictions, creativity and ideas

Your logic and your knowledge and what you think is shit

I don’t watch super-bowls or sitcoms

I resent the TV when that shit’s on

They scare me, those American psychos with their pretty business cards

And plastic housewives who watch FOX news and drive their husband’s cars

They don’t even labor, just buy products for their labels

Never a thought to what isn’t on someone else’s dinner table

 

So if I really feel I have a judgment to place

It won’t be on the poor man begging for change

Not knowing the content of his mental state

Sure simplicity or bad habits may have led him to that place

Or perhaps the bars of the human zoo just disturbed his inner ape

I don’t know the circumstances that led him to that corner

And though I can be a cynic I’m certainly not a scorner
Sometimes I tend to put labels on people’s foreheads

Like we aren’t just apes from the forest

 

The tribe I identify with is the thinkers

There was an era I had a stint with the believers

For a long time I was one who just pretended to know the answers

Wasted years of critical thought and research with rhetoric and banter

Now done with propaganda, I search the facts for answers

Surely the vapor that spreads through an unfed mind is like a cancer

Our intelligence gives us our place on the food chain

When did so many stop using our brains

In-groups/Out groups like common animals but we’re the Human Race

You know: the ones who harm Home Planet instead of contribute

I know there are better ways to put our thumbs to use

I just can’t align myself with agendas so unethical

I would like to think we could evolve past acting as such imbeciles

But I’m living in America…heartland of those fools

 

I wonder when America might pull her head out of her ass

She must have heard about the nice guy

And how he finished last

She steps on those who are lower

She must have bought the lie

That insisted climbing on each other’s backs

Is how you get up high

Claiming equal opportunity

 Free enterprise sure wears a disguise

Selling the American Dream

To demographical groups who buy the lie

But try and try as they might

The rich get richer and the poor don’t get by

 

Unethical America

Using up resources and killing each other

Protecting our guns while our children run for cover

Cursing our president who advocates for our mothers

And advocates for our health and the lives of our brothers

Because we just all want to blame someone else and keep what we have

We want to believe the propaganda that makes us feel better and pledge allegiance to the flag

But we have come too far from our roots

We have evolved but intelligence and ethics dissolved

Because we are so far removed

 

From humanity and brotherhood

Perhaps we should go back to the trees in the woods

Where killing is a means of survival and not a means of money

Nature red in tooth and claw and milk and honey

Where we didn’t need to rape Home Planet for oil and gold

Because we didn’t need products or labels and we weren’t bought or sold

 

I wouldn’t wish to trade scientific knowledge or philosophy

I would hate to give up logic and reason and creativity

But it comes at the expense of such ignorance

As man manages to destroy with everything he invents

It is hard for me to muster the understanding or respect

The selfish agendas that deny cause and effect

My heart bleeds for the damage we’ve managed to inflict

And no matter how I love knowledge and facts and intelligence

I’m not here to sit on a fence

If it meant the end of such greed and violence

I’d choose ignorance

Imagine if we used our brains exclusively to make the world a better place

For not just one species or demographic or nation or state

That my species is something to contemplate.