Run, City Man!
Song warns of nuclear and c.b.r. attacks by rogue nations whose objectives are facilitated by highly concentrated urban centers
RUN CITY MAN is the title of a song by Paul Hall, the song meant to discuss the likelihood of individuals lessening dependence on urban lifestyles, song urges the city man to escape social pressures or folkways or morays that would tend to amalgamate him into the urban social structure, song explains that clear warnings are prevalent but are so slight as to seem invisible, the world explodes around an oblivious dennison as it did in Pompey and Herculeum, song suggests it prudent to leave before suffering the irreparable mental damage of seeing his world destroyed before his eyes, song points out that values like love and freedom will more than replace what is lost.
There is refuge from a nuclear winter above the cloud line in the mountains.
It's not over. There is always some element of human society enamored of destruction. There are substrates in any given conglomerate of people that behave much like an electro magnet in a scrap yard. All it needs is an electric current and each constituent lines up. In surprising regularity throughout the history of humanity social upheavals evolving large followings around some central figurehead have flared up evoking as extreme a destruction as the technology of it's time permitted. That was bad enough when you could walk around a marching army armed with iron swords. This time the flare ups come with increasingly devastating armaments. Nuclear ones, with subterranean burst capability delivered by smart weapons technology.
Run, City Man!
Written in 1980 part in Paris and part in the Pyrenees Mountains.
(c) (p) by Paul Hall, 1987
Run, city man!
Cut your roots and go.
Your world will be exploding round you.
What more would you know?
Wise men look for warnings,
see the things that do not show.
Run, city man,
get outa here,
before it's too late to go.
Ah, before it is too late to go.
Mountain roads will catch the tears
from your tear stained cheeks.
A broken heart will take you far
as hardship loops the peaks
like those mangled, twisted girders
in the a-bombed lands below.
Run, city man,
leave your cities,
before your cities blow.
And before it's too late to go.
As the sea gull glides at dawning
and the swallow flies till night,
run, city man,
leave your cities.
Speedy make your flight.
You must leave their world so dark.
You must not return.
Run, city man,
get out of town,
before your cities burn.
And before it is too late to go.
Glowing moss on the mountain crags
that you run past in your flight
will contrast with horizons
as you RUN with all your might.
Run, city man!
Forget their homes of fear.
Just wait as far you travel
and watch freedom's love appear.
Before it's too late to go.
Before it is too late.
It is too late.
TOO LATE TO GO.
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