There Is No Time
Lou Reed wrote "There Is No Time" in 1989. It appeared on New York, his most explicitly political record — a cold-eyed dispatch from a city that felt like it was coming apart.
The poem is a refusal. A refusal of celebration when there's nothing to celebrate. A refusal of the comfortable gesture that substitutes for action. The refrain — there is no time — isn't about being busy. It's about the failure of postponement as a life strategy.
It ends with a reversal: this is the time. Same words, different direction.
I keep coming back to it.