We dance, merry in a fortunate life

With lights flashing blue and green and red

Our only wish: that this will never end

A sentence without a terminal point

We are young. We are free in this great dance

The songs on our lips a victory cry

 

And then we hear the first shattering cry

It sounds like someone pleading for their life

We stop but others continue to dance

As the floor floods with some strange, vital red

The tension has sharpened to a fine point

As countless lives begin to find their end

 

Reality begins to break and bend

They run, mouths twisted with a howling cry

Blood flows free and splatters—not like a point

But a river much like Styx stealing life

Too much sorrow; too much death; too much red

Someone with a gun starts a graveyard dance

 

Making young tombs fit for a ballroom dance

Our only wish: that this all will just end

Done with guns; done with bodies; done with red

Losing the strength to fight—to even cry

Oh, what an awful, hateful, spiteful life

To let this come to such a fatal point

 

I wish my words had some purposeful point

But I was made to steal and love and dance

I cannot make or shape or save a life

But how can this blood and gore be the end

How can this end without God’s anguished cry

My brethren and I only see red

 

Is this for what we were all born and bred

To be filled with bullets, terminal points

To hear a lover’s frightful deathbed cry

As we ascend to join the angels’ dance

This can’t be the end. This won’t be the end

I’ll carry forty-nine souls all my life

 

Please cherish red roses and this blessed life

Point; laugh; recall those with an early end

Cry and know we continue their lively dance