Cars and cars on hard, thin rails.
Heat and smoke fill heavy sails.
What's creaking by is blood-black coal,
taken direct to Santa's pole.
Thousands of decades of moving tons,
just to punish the naughty ones.
As fast as they can dig the stuff,
use it to fill their stockings up.
Coal Train is a dragon's name,
With spray paint scales, headlight flame.
Like the wyrm, coal made no friends,
and like the wyrm, coal must end.
Shot by Bard, through one weak scale,
or creaking, die upon the rails.
With no one left, not a soul,
just ever-belching, blood-black coal.
We played a show today! Babaganoush was supposed to have a show at a bar tonight, but instead it was cancelled so we played at an ANTI-COAL rally! Right by the train tracks. We turned what would have been just a bunch of cold people holding stark signs, into Bluegrass, party with a small crowd of people. It was great! I adjusted some of our lyrics on the fly to apply to the protest:
Let me tell you where I am.
I'm right next to a Railroad!
Let me tell you what I can
I don't want no more Coal!
It worked better in lyrical form. Anyway we had a blast. 32-96000 TONS of coal go through Missoula every single day. For each pound of coal, there is an output of 2 pounds of atmospheric Carbon. I don't know how... I'm no chem wiz. Well, Then the band just went and had a slice of pie. It was delightful. Our fingers froze off, but we sure were smiling.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This picture's out of date, though not inaccurate.
Welcome!
This picture's out of date, though not inaccurate.
About Me
- Tommy Peppergrass
- Craftsbury Common, Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, United States
- I have studied the efforts of modern heroes working in vain to turn the world back to some era of perfection, in vain to move the world forward accelerating cultural change unnaturally to a future ideal, or vainly dealing some damage as we all go down in flames. I have tried all three of these routes in my environmental life, but now none of them ring true. They all contribute, however, to a single truth: above the animals, above the trees, above human kind, my chief moral obligation is to the land. As succinctly as I can muster, the vision I have for this world manifests thus (1) a working landscape, understood and nurtured by its people, (2) a wild landscape permitted to exist by staying humanity’s destructive hand, and (3) a joinery of the working and wild, made not of steel cables, but of sinew, just as strong, yet with an acknowledgement of impermanence.
4 comments:
Great lyrics, Adam! And a great cause, too.
One small point--the hero who killed Smaug was Bard, son of Brand. Dale was the city.
please check your email tommy peppergrass and write me back!!!!!
The atmospheric carbon is most likely measured in the form of carbon dioxide. The addition of the two oxygen atoms more than triples the weight of the initial carbon atom from the coal. Just a guess. You should check your source to see their definitions.
Yep, you got it right Dan, I clarified it with a friend earlier. Its not that the CO2 miraculously multiplies as it burns, its that Carbon from the coal combines with atmospheric oxygen once the Carbon is freed into the air.
Post a Comment