Oxygen ('s Alright to Breathe)

Many of the graphics 5 Fingers used came from a book titled "Therapeutic Uses for Adhesive Tape" by Johnson & Johnson.

(Heavy Industry)

Death-head doorknobs dripping DDT
Fly like bats from formaldehyde seas.
Metallic mosquitoes and electronic gnats
Eat cardboard eggshells in acid-bath vats.

I don't mind reality
Oxygen's alright to breathe
But I can't swim through the fish-nets falling from the sky
In the sucking crystal swiftness of your whirl-pool eyes.

Jack-hammers dance in shows of molten glass
While parrots eating parachutes poison ocean bass.
Dinner plates and coffee trays heave hydrocarbon sigh
And plutonium feeds on secrets jerked from the jaws of butterflies.

I don't mind reality
Oxygen's alright to breathe
But the velvet, barbed-wire tresses of your midnight hair
Burn my shaking fingers in this neon, chrome-stained air.

Pipelines singing with petroleum tongues
Harmonize with plastic flies in lead-lined iron lungs.
Celluloid centipedes sell foam from cinder beer
While blind baboons in business suits buy bags of viscous fear.

I don't mind reality
Oxygen's alright to breathe
But the soft warm silent places seething on your skin
Dries the blood in my temples and pierces my gut with pins.

David Graver / Randy Magnus
May 1982

(Originally David had "I don't mind gravity", but I thought it was better for the times to change gravity to reality.)