We Used To Own The Night
- Spoke in code and double-dares
- And magic-marker murals
- The ink we let lie on the stairs
- It claimed the crawlspace crucial
- Critical, cautious crawl
- Memorize the floors
- No battle cries but nervous sighs
- Of shaking saboteurs
-
- Don't use your given name out here
- It slows your step to the stars
- For all our plots and diagrams
- We only breathe when it's dark
- It's been a year, but just today
- Swear we'll still run this block
- From the basements to the barricades
- From dusk 'till five o'clock
-
- Only on this street these lungs
- Attack this Akron air
- Rip it in past teeth, this tongue
- I taste this street, I swear
- The sidewalk-stripes and sewer pipes
- Each step seduced a sketch
- We wore our symbol on our backs
- Our code-names on our chests
-
- We would swear that we could race the sun
- Run West and never age
- Exist between the satellites
- And never face the day
- But we never made it off that street
- The crawlspace always jeered
- And we found ourselves downstairs, asleep
- We'll try again next year
-
- But now the coats that showed our signs
- They don't fit any more
- We used to stomp and sing and cry
- But now we only snore
- I guess that we outgrew it all
- And I'm not sure what to blame
- We lost our symbols, lost the night
- We lost our secret names