Benjamin Franklin's America

I can live wild and free, or safe and secure.

The choice alone paralyzes me.

What do you want to do?What do you want to do?What do you want to do?What do you want to be?What do you want to be? What do you want to be?Make a choice, makeachoice, makeachoice. Who are you?What are you doing with your life?Time is ticking, time is ticking, what are you waiting for?join the march to the grave, in step to the tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, into the box into the box into the box...


But, I remember. Yes! I remember! I remember the blue cloudless sky, I remember the sun on my shoulders. You remember nothing. The night is long remember your unimportance, sleep. Sleep, sleep - sleep, sleep - my brain is filled with cotton, so I will - sleep, sleep- sleep, sleep...

But! Sleep, sleep, sleep as a mute speaker does, sleep.



What am I going to do? What am I going to do? A broken record, like a rock in my shoe, what am I going to do? DECIDE. Which cow run do you chose?


What am I going to do with my life?
you do not have to be good
What am I going to do?
you do not have to walk on your knees
What am I going to say?
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
Who am I going to be?
you only have to let the soft animal of your body
Hard. Must be hard.
love what it loves.
Love? Where is there room for love?

I can't see. I can't see! Who am I?
Who are you?
Who am I?
How many selves have you? And which of those selves do you want to be?
I don't know, I don't know. Why are you asking me!


To become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one's interior, unchartered chaos. Chaos? No chaos. Only perfect self-control, self-sufficient, Self-centered, Self-delusional. Self, Self, Self. What a funny word, SELF, much like elf. The truth about ourselves is always at a variance with what we wish to be. Push harder. Fit the mould. We cannot abide truth in others unless we are willing to acknowledge the truth about ourselves. What truth? I'm perfect. If you're perfect, then what are you doing? Damn...and so the spiral starts again....
The wholeness of a man is his soul...it is the unknown him as well as the known. Emotions are messy. Failure is inconvenient, don't even try, just drown yourself now in the sea of entertainment, comfortably numb. There, aren't you happy? Where is you celophane smile? We become social creatures because we cannot live anyother way. Why live? What life? [O! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this life!] But in order to become social, there are a great many things that we nust not become. Moo.
And we are frightend of those forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security.
Security? Safe, Safe, Precious, Safe. Musn't fall, musn't reach or will fall, must stay here safe. Yes, safe with my material blanket, safe. It is not better to hold what we have, and to pay the price of it with fear? We shall live with fear, but at least it will not be the fear of the unknown.
But, who am I, again?
We do not know, we do not know.
Who knows what will come out of the soul of a man?
[...and the conscience shall be thrust down...]
The soul of a man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fecing it off!
[...the light of life shall not be extinguished...
Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation.
[...but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in someday not yet come...]
And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in the pound forever? More fools they!
[...and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.]
It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up. There am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin's America looking at the barbed wire.