I heard a statistic recently that's been keeping me from sleep
One person every two weeks leaps from the Golden Gate bridge of San Francisco into the murky waters of the deep
And that fall will last for 4 seconds at 86 miles per hour
Colliding with a current by which they are devoured and now I can't stop
The visions about the little decisions
That might have been made
From when they woke up in the morning to when they went back to sleep again and
My heart hurts as their fellow humans who
For some reason I'm assuming that maybe they got the tube and read the morning news
On the paper given to them by some dude
Who they would meet on their commute
And I'm thinking what did they have for breakfast
Did they make a bowl of porridge and pour a glass of fresh orange?
And what shoes did they wear and what colour were their socks?
Were they the think ankle ones that they would wear when they played squash
Or the thermal type, the ones they'd wear on a hike
Around the city hills at night overlooking San Francisco city lights
And did they decide to style their hair?
Put that Brylcreem in their hair and stare into the mirror
Their mind elsewhere but their reflection as consistent as ever
It is always there
And did they decide to lock their door?
Knowing that they were never coming back
Well if it did, it connected us,
I did the same when I left my flat
You and I we are connected and I wish
We made that clearer
It may remove some of the fear we feel when we view each other's
Exterior
See I've been going this prison once a month
And I sit with these men and I try not to think about
What they've done
Cause when I do, our connection gets severed and
The distance that grows between us is so large
It can't be measured
These men are modern day lepers
They're men with bells around their necks
Because I judge them for a sin
By a moral standard I've never met
And yet it's the same process I use when I turn a stranger into a shadow
A shopkeeper into a transaction and a
Criminal into an animal but
We are human
And isn't that the goal to become human?
Fully here, fully present interwoven restored humans but
We have made such a connection with failure and then
Rejection, success and then acceptance that we can't have a
Conversation without preconceived misconceptions but
I don't want the first time my daughter hears I love you to be when she
Brings home an A
Or for my son to know I think he's amazing just 'cause he scored his first goal in a game
I wanna tell her while she's brushing her teeth
I wanna sing it over him while he's still asleep
I want us to eat with those strangers that we meet in the street
'Cause our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh
When we learn where the weary ones weep
And we go to where the broken ones live
And we make life warmer than that water that
Flows under the Golden Gate Bridge