“This poem captures the ability to see through cracks of the city in which you live, for better and worse – for all of its criminality and corruption, but also for the strength of the people within it. The main theme that carries within is that to claim that "The writing is on the wall” is to fool yourself into thinking that everyone shares your point of view, and that the momentum of a movement is there without you actually taking action yourself.

So go spit in the cannon’s mouth and get shit done"

"But the writing is on the wall"

Cried the fresh cut to the old wound still bleeding

As if he didn't know

As if he hadn't done his fair share of reading

Like he'd never felt the flames of revolution

The young man's simple solution

Peter out time and time again

Like he'd never spotted revolution's hole before the end

And the writing on the wall

That impotent echo of inertia unmasked

The writing on the wall that really matters

Is in the Jewish quarter under bulletproof glass

It holds a lost family's past the top

Will fight to be forgotten

This whole fucking city's rotten to the core, but

It's you, and it's me

It's the woman heavy with child

Screaming "Please!" from the doorway

She clutches her belly as triage sets in

When the night street sweeper lets her choose which one of her children

It's the jacked up jackboot with his foot on the neck of the pale girl

The frail girl dimming the light in the only eyes

Bright enough to see a pattern through the cracks

This lonely boy chewed up and swallowed by streets, spit, famine, and rats

It's the words of the last librarian

The only man among us with enough courage and true grit

To save our knowledge from the fires we lit

When he burst, arms full, from the blaze

One proud voice in the panic, he called out

"Son, if you're going to cry then cry havoc"

It's the neighbourhood pill pusher, a family man

It's our weakness, it's our strength

We are the very fingertips of life's outstretched hand

But you'll find no spark in the sandstone dark

'Cause what the holy men won't preach

Is that the one thing that unites us is reach

We reach forward

And there aren't enough songs in the world

Not enough words in my tongue

Nor enough breath in my lungs

There is no echo that has lasted so long

No shadow that has stretched so far

As we, we reach forward

And its safe hands back down the line in the endless chain

Not lost, never lost

When the strength we gained from their giving remains

We reach for the echo, we reach forward

For the moment between waking and sleep

For the sum, not some of us, together we leap

And yet we eat enough stone

So hard hearts hide a home

Under promise, understanding

Under children's skin and bone

And the writing on the wall you love

Was hand-penned by the censor

So spit in the cannon's mouth

And tell 'em Ink sent ya"