Prisoners

Wake up, my brothers and sisters!

Wake up and learn that we’re all prisoners

Prisoners of life, time, fear, and death

And of every dream we dream, and of every hope we hope

And there is nothing we can do about it

We’re prisoners of our bodies, as well as our bodies age with us within

You didn’t ask for it, I didn’t ask for it

And so, we’re all prisoners of our tongues that speak what we don’t want to speak

Prisoners of our ears that hear what we don’t want to hear

Prisoners of our eyes that see what we don’t want to see

And there is nothing we can do about it

So, we must keep moving, keep moving forward

We’re the object, and life is the force that moves the object

We’re prisoners of life’s inertia

But freedom, my brothers and sisters, freedom is but a blank page

In The Book of Man

The only season when we experienced freedom was childhood

So brief, so heartbreakingly brief

Before childhood, we were prisoners in the womb

And after childhood, we fell through life

Rolling down, down, down, or moving up, up, up

It’s a matter of perspective my brothers and sisters, a matter of perspective

But despite our perspective, we’re all prisoners of something

Something that either we or someone else created

And that keeps us in chains in our self-made jail

We’re all prisoners of life, time, fear, and death

Prisoners of our hopes, dreams, duties, modest ambitions

It’s our nature. We’re prisoners of our nature

The lion hunts, kills, and eats the zebra

It’s the lion’s nature to hunt and kill to eat

Hence, the lion is a prisoner of its nature, too

But the lion doesn’t seek transcendence, so it eats what it kills

Likewise, the lion, we hunt and kill

But we kill not because we’re hungry but because we’re angry

And because we seek transcendence, we don’t eat the neighbour that we kill

Yet we can’t escape the force that compels us to destroy, to kill

Hence, we can’t be free because we’re hostages of our nature

If we were free, we would be confused, and our nature would be confused

And we wouldn’t know what to do with our freedom

And god would be confused.