Awakening Poem by babylon patrol

wake up, wake up!
wake up or die!
wake up, wake up!
wake up & cry
fighter pilot:
wake up & fly!
if you don’t take control
you will crash and die!
your dreams are nightmares -
you and i
are nothing but specks
in the empty sky
your fighting your wars
while you are high!
why don’t you come down
to earth and lie
awake in the grass and look at the sky
empty & peaceful
you’ll then be ready to die…

This poem came at the beginning of a retreat, an attempt to pull myself together and wake up to what’s really important, in fact what’s real. The fighter pilot is a powerful image to me. Years before I had made a postcard for a friend of a fighting jet flying through the sky that just had a poem on the backside:
Kampfpilot, du gleitest einsam durch die Stille;
Deine Heimat ist der Tod
Wo ist dein Selbst,
Wo ist dein Wille?
(Fighter pilot, you are gliding solitarily through silence;
Your home is death. Where is your self, where is your will?)
I never met or heard from that friend and don’t even know whether he got the card or knew from whom it was. Years later I heard that he had ‘crashed; ’ he was at the center of a scandal; he was probably guilty only because of his innocence and ignorance but the consequences were drastic and I never heard anything of him ever after.
The fighter pilot is somewhat associated with this friend but here both the pilot and the admonisher are parts of what I experience as me.