Project: Unstable balance

12 TONGUE-TWISTER

Beneath the bench the billy goat thrives,
While people all over the world scrape by.
They cannot put supper or lunch on a plate,
Though they break both their hearts and their backs for a wage.
But you are crafty and cunning, as sly as a fox;
You duck every doubt and pass blame round the clock.
The others are always the ones in the wrong,
Made answer for sins that were yours all along.
Above the bench the billy goat dies,
Yet wasting its life would be most unwise,
While human life isn't worth even a cent
Unless you were born in the Occident.
And it spins and it turns, ever faster around,
This battered old ball that we call the world.
And it spins and it turns, with no peace to be found;
To reach for the heavens, it's hitting rock bottom.
You knead their tired blood into mortar and mud,
Mixing their bones with the concrete and stone,
To burnish the glory of all your new empires,
With gleaming battalions of sky-scraping spires.
And it spins and it turns, ever faster around,
This battered old ball that we call the world.
And it spins and it turns, with no peace to be found;
To reach for the heavens, it's hitting rock bottom.
Beneath the bench the billy goat bleats,
A sign that somebody still longs for release,
For a fate a little less wretched and grim,
And to break from the filth they are drowning in.
And you, you bastard, spit straight in his face,
Spew insults and stone him, then shrink from the chase;
You swiftly pull back the hand you had raised,
With the courage a sacristan proudly displays.
And it spins and it turns, ever faster around,
This battered old ball that we call the world.
And it spins and it turns, with no peace to be found;
To reach for the heavens, it's hitting rock bottom.
Above the bench the billy goat bounds,
While the minister tenders his conscience by ounce;
Every crumb is contracted, commissioned and spent,
And he fails to perceive what its absence has meant.
We are horses upon a carousel,
Each shows his arse for the next one to smell;
Each stiff-necked and proud to be first in the line,
Yet sniffing the backside of one just behind.
And it spins and it turns, ever faster around,
This battered old ball that we call the world.
And it spins and it turns, with no peace to be found,
Still digging a pit ever deeper underground.
And it spins and it turns, ever faster around,
This battered old ball that we call the world.
And it spins and it turns, with no peace to be found,
Still digging a pit ever deeper underground.

Tongue-twisters are meant to discipline the mouth.

They force it to race, stumble, repeat itself, to submit to a rhythm more powerful than meaning. They are innocent games.

Yet sometimes the slightest change of light is enough for a nursery rhyme to cease belonging to childhood and begin to resemble the world.

Tongue-Twister is born of that fracture: the tongue runs on, almost laughing, while reality bares its teeth around it. The words play with the goat and the bench, but behind the machinery of the game something older and fouler surfaces: the ease with which we grow accustomed to injustice, the dexterity with which we shift the blame, the elegance with which we call progress what is often merely exploitation raised vertically.

It is a song about language when it stops concealing the world and begins to betray it.

Because certain words seem born to make us smile.

Until we realise that they were merely teaching us to pronounce horror without stammering.