Grace Under Pressure

All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves is stay alive


Ragged lines of ragged grey
Skeletons, they shuffle away
Shouting guards and smoking guns
Will cut down the unlucky ones


I clutch the wire fence until my fingers bleed
A wound that will not heal
A heart that cannot feel
Hoping that the horror will recede
Hoping that tomorrow we'll all be freed


Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger
Too weak to cry


I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate
Are the liberators here?
Do i hope or do i fear?
For my father and my brother, it's too late
But i must help my mother stand up straight


Are we the last ones left alive?
Are we the only human beings to survive?

I see red
And it hurts my head
Guess it must be something
That i read


It's the color of your heartbeat
A rising summer sun
The battle lost or won
The flash to fashion
And the pulse to passion
Feels red
Inside my head
And truth is often bitter
Left unsaid
Said red red
Thinking about the overhead
The underfed


Couldn't we talk about something else instead?


We've got mars on the horizon
Says the national midnight star
(it's true)
What you believe is what you are
A pair of dancing shoes
The soviets are the blues
The reds
Under your bed
Lying in the darkness
Dead ahead


And the mercury is rising
Barometer starts to fall
You know it gets to us all
The pain that is learning
And the rain that is burning
Feel red
Still...go ahead
You see black and white
And i see red
Red
(not blue)

To live between a rock and a hard place
In between time
Cruising in prime time
Soaking up the cathode rays


To live between the wars in our time
Living in real time
Holding the good time
Holding on to yesterdays


Chorus


You know how that rabbit feels
Going under your speeding wheels
Bright images flashing by
Like windshields towards a fly
Frozen in the fatal climb
But the wheels of time
Just pass you by
Wheels can take you around
Wheels can cut you down
We can go from boom to bust
From dreams to a bowl of dust
We can fall from rockets' red glare
Down to "brother can you spare..."
Another war
Another wasteland
And another lost generation


It slips between your hands like water
This living in real time
A dizzying lifetime
Reeling by on celluloid


Struck between the eyes
By the big-time world
Walking uneasy streets
Hiding beneath the sheets
Got to try and fill the void


Chorus

Things crawl in the darkness
That imagination spins
Needles at your nerve ends
Crawl like spiders on your skin


Pounding in your temples
And a surge of adrenaline
Every muscle tense to fence the enemy within


I'm not giving in to security under pressure
I'm not missing out on the promise of adventure
I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes
Experience to extremes...


Suspicious-looking stranger
Flashes you a dangerous grin
Shadows across your window...
Was it only trees in the wind?


Every breath a static charge,
A tongue that tastes like tin
Steely-eyed outside to hide the enemy within


To you, is it movement or is it action?
Is it contact or just reaction?
And you...revolution or just resistance?
Is it living, or just existence?
Yeah, you! it takes a little more persistence
To get up and go the distance


Chorus