Rush headlong and hard at life
or just sit at home and wait.
All things good and all the wrong
will come right to you: it's fate.

Hear the music, dance if you can.
Dress in rags or wear your jewels.
Drink your choice, nurse your fear
in this old honkytonk of fools.

Living in the modern age,
death for virtue is the wage.
So it seems in darker hours.
Evil wins, kindness cowers.

Ruled by violence and vice
We all stand upon thin ice.
Are we brave or are we mice,
here upon such thin, thin ice?

Dare we linger, dare we skate?
Dare we laugh or celebrate,
knowing we may strain the ice?
Preserve the ice at any price?

Faraway in China,
the people sometimes say,
life is often bitter and
all too seldom gay.
Bitter as dragon tears,
great cascades of sorrows flood
down all the years,
drowning our tomorrows.

Faraway in China,
the people also say,
life is sometimes joyous
if all to often gray,
Although life is seasoned
with bitter dragon tears,
seasoning is just a spice
within the brew of years.
Bad times are only rice,
tears are one more flavor,
that gives us sustenance,
something we can savor.

Those who would banish the sin of greed
embrace the sin of envy as their creed.
Those who seek to banish envy as well,
only draw elaborate new maps of hell.

Those with passion to change the world,
look of themselves as saints, as pearls,
and by the launching of noble endeavor,
flee dreaded introspection forever.