SUNDAY REVIEW / WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE?

Video: Click here.

By William S. Burroughs [1914-1997]

You gentlemen who think you have a mission

To purge us of the seven deadly sins

Should first sort out the basic food position

Then start your preaching, that's where it begins

Your lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well

Should learn for once, the way the world is run

However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell

Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving

Get proper helpings when we all start carving

What keeps mankind alive? What keeps mankind alive?

The fact that millions are daily tortured

Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed

Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance

In keeping its humanity repressed

And for once you must try not to shrink the facts

Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

ABOUT:

William Burroughs, right, with Maurice
Girodias on Rue Git-Le Coeur, Paris.
The street is where the no-star Beat Hotel
was located.  Home to Burroughs, Ginsberg
and other "Beat" era poets in the 50s.

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. Heir to the adding machine making fortune, Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature.  He admitted to being a heroin addict for 15 years before writing his most noted work “Naked Lunch,” a title suggested by his friend Jack Kerouac.