Lyric

There’s a blue light shining

On the college on the hill

Where the professors talk of freedom

And the world stands standing still

Down beyond the river

There’s a red sign in the rain

Where the factory doors are closing

And they’re calling out the names

One side says, “You’re the problem.”

The other says, “You don’t care.”

But both go home at midnight

To the same cold evening air

And nobody remembers

How the road got drawn so wide

When the people on the other side

Were once just people on your side

Somewhere between the headlines

And the coffee on the stove

There’s a country full of people

Trying hard to make it home

There are lines between us

Drawn in blue and red

Some are made of borders

Some are made inside our heads

There are lines between us

But the rain falls just the same

And every man and woman

Still gets tired of playing the game

You can call me foreign

You can call me one of you

But before you draw the line again

Tell me what the line can do

There’s a shirt that says “Democracy,”

Made somewhere far away

Hanging in a college store

For thirty dollars today

A man in the doorway counts the cash

A worker checks the freight

A woman worries ’bout her job

When another tariff changes the rate

Everybody’s got a number

Everybody’s got a price

Somebody’s selling freedom

While somebody pays the price

And the dream they put on posters

Looks so perfect in the light

Till you ask the man who cleans the floor

How much time he had last night

They say the market knows the answer

They say the numbers never lie

But numbers never tell you

Who was standing there when someone cried

There are lines between us

Drawn in blue and red

Some are made of borders

Some are made inside our heads

There are lines between us

But the rain falls just the same

And every man and woman

Still gets tired of playing the game

You can call me foreign

You can call me one of you

But before you draw the line again

Tell me what the line can do

Emily knows the weight of names

That strangers never learn

When China’s written on your family tree

And every question starts to burn

“Whose side are you really on?”

They ask her in the hall

As if a human heart can fit

Inside a flag at all

She says, “I was born here.”

And the room gets quiet again

Because sometimes being American

Means explaining where you’ve been

I used to think the answers

Were hidden in the books

In physics, laws and numbers

In the way a system looks

Then I walked inside Wall Street

Wearing someone else’s suit

Saw a thousand people working

On a problem no one could compute

One man moved the money

One man measured risk

One man checked the paperwork

One man never knew the list

Everybody did their job right

Everybody played their part

But somewhere in the machine

Something disappeared from the heart

And Yuri said

“Don’t look for a monster

When a system has no face

Sometimes everybody’s right

And still nobody wins the race.”

So I wrote it in my notebook:

FACT

ASSUMPTION

UNKNOWN

Then I stopped beneath the word

I’d never learned to write

PERSON

I came from people

Who crossed a line at night

Carrying tomorrow

Like a match against the dark

My father said

“Don’t make trouble

Just keep the family safe.”

He never talked about the country

He talked about one more day

Maybe that’s the American Dream

Nobody puts upon a wall—

Not becoming rich or famous

Just surviving through it all

There are lines between us

Drawn in blue and red

Some are made of borders

Some are made inside our heads

There are lines between us

But the rain falls just the same

And every heart beneath the flag

Still beats beneath the same sky

You can call me foreign

You can call me one of you

But before you draw the line again

Ask yourself—

Who drew it?

And ask yourself—

Who does it serve?

And ask yourself—

Who gets left behind

When everybody gets what they deserve?

There are lines between us

But they don’t have to stay

There are names we never noticed

There are lives we walked away from

There are people in the shadows

Working through another day

There are lines between us

But I can see them now

Not every line is a border

Not every wall is made of stone

And maybe being American

Is not about where you belong—

Maybe it’s about

Who you refuse to leave alone

The university lights go dark

The diner closes down

The trucks keep rolling east

The cleaners keep moving west

And somewhere between the blue

And somewhere between the red

A young man walks home alone

He looks at the country

The country doesn’t look back

Not yet

The lines between us

An Unseen American

Still unseen