Listen: about that history, the thing nobody tells you 
is that you can learn it or ignore it, either way 
you’re going to repeat it, 

the wheel of fortune will turn you inside out, the rhyme 
of it a pattern as familiar as the iambs 
in the verses of your grandmother, 

the pulse beneath the wrist of a thousand generations,
stone for stone across the eons, children cry,   
you know (don’t you) what’s coming,

(what’s already come, and gone, and come again) 

the only choice that’s left to you is eyes wide open 
or shut, either way it’s okay, you’ll choose again, 
in this life or the next.