Chris Stroffolino

When The Sky's The Same Color As The Sea

Relish the complexity more likely
To be the question "are we fighting?"
Than "what are we fighting for?" Singing
Is fighting, fighting the song that comes
Like a mistake in someone else's
As if that's the only way to work within
Harmonic laws, to fight within melodic walls.

Oh, for a horse of air, a patient producer,
A white flag of surrender, a sheet of music
With no notes not your own, from within
The glade where health and happiness
Are one but must seem two, or more,
Lest we hear from within no harmony
But the monotony of unison in the endless
Clash of swords and crash of bombs
To destroy earth with earth, to bomb
The desolate back into life as if
That were submission. My war song
Surrenders its aims to the patriotism
Of partying, the consumer consumed
By produce (without a supermarket
For a face it'd be inhuman)

Happy and healthy outside the mean,
The truce of balance, the cease fire
Of song slung like grease at the diner
I made a simple killing to build
The bombings of the complex,
Flowers fiercely rooted in carpets
Pouches whose health provides
A slower happiness for which
We lack patience and lack patients
Who know not what they do,
And doctors who would if they did.

Damn this war between health & happiness
And being in the midst you can't know
& knowing in the midst you can't be.
A duality of good for nothing knowers
And actors reciting lines they forget
They authored once upon a time
Before society wedged itself
between the food we will become
and the shit we were like a song
mistaken for a war by someone
I'd believe in if he had the guts
To say he doesn't believe in anything

 

Chris Stroffolino has just recently moved to Oakland. He teaches at St. Mary's College and is diligently trying to save up enough money to rent a rehearsal/performance loft to lure Bay Area musicians to....hopefully in the next year. He's also published some books, and stuff. Mostly all out of print.

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