Five Hundred Thousand Marchers (Smedley Butler)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your hands turned swords into ploughshares,
synaptic pathways rewiring like garden soil
breaking rank, mirror neurons firing wild—
you saw the machinery of empire grinding
and your cortex remapped the whole thing.
Long-term potentiation burned the truth:
we're fed lies through myelinated channels,
each synapse a small betrayal
until you cracked the code wide open.
Your hippocampus locked the moment
when you finally spoke what soldiers knew—
that generals profit while the young men bleed.

[Chorus]
You grew gardens where the weapons were,
planted clarity in every word you spoke,
your voice the axial thread
that braided conscience into action.
Every truth you told was resurrection,
every sermon a seed pushed through concrete,
and your laughter—phantom joy—
still echoes where the guns went quiet.

[Verse 2]
Proprioceptive honesty: you felt your body's place
in the machine and refused it.
Theta waves of conscience breaking through
the predictive coding that said stay silent,
stay safe, stay small.
Your axonal branching reached new territories—
cortical remapping of what courage means:
not flags and drums but standing up
when standing costs everything.
Interoceptive fire—you heard your heartbeat
saying no, no, no.

[Chorus]
You grew gardens where the weapons were,
planted clarity in every word you spoke,
your voice the axial thread
that braided conscience into action.
Every truth you told was resurrection,
every sermon a seed pushed through concrete,
and your laughter—phantom joy—
still echoes where the guns went quiet.

[Bridge]
Neurogenesis in the spaces where your doubt once lived,
new cells of certainty blooming—
you chose the difficult path,
the one that feeds people instead of burning them.

[Chorus]
You grew gardens where the weapons were,
planted clarity in every word you spoke,
your voice the axial thread
that braided conscience into action.
Every truth you told was resurrection,
every sermon a seed pushed through concrete,
and your laughter—phantom joy—
still echoes where the guns went quiet.

[Outro]
Your hands still dig the earth.
The garden's still growing.

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**WORD COUNT: 288**