Lyric of the Week: JACK

You shake my hand with such false cordiality

All your high-sounding loftiness is so much banality

You claim poverty but it’s cheap frugality

You hide selfishness behind religion no problem with duality

You monopolize G-d, the Law, and Biblicality

You put on righteousness but it’s really venality

You say morals and honor but forget the legality

You spit on the spirit and only want the literality

You blame me for all the incidental inconsequentiality

You demonize me and claim all morality

You don’t care about the details only the generality

You dump on my head the onus of criminality

You say you’re right and I’m wrong with such a finality

You treat my side like some triviality

You want to blame me through some technicality

All your deals are one-sided, no reciprocality

Any situation but yours is a superficiality

You don’t even want to consider the slightest liberality

You don’t want to know from any circumstantiality

You throw down the sewer all rationality

You treat this incident like it was a fatality

Just step back and look at this farcicality

Everybody but you agrees it’s such a comicality

I don’t understand your sick twisted mentality

Get a life, dude, get a personality

You never use your head, only your vocality

It’s all your opinion, not at all actuality

You go off the handle with such nonsensicality

You blow things way out of whack with no sense of proportionality

You see through a tunnel, not at the actuality

The way decent folks treat each other, you have no conceptuality

It’s you and only you, no grip on reality

Well fuck you Jack

©2025 The Hesh Inc.

Damages.

I had gotten into a bit of personal litigation with a local businessman I had been working for in the mid-1990s. Rather than take the case to court, we had it adjudicated by a rabbi whom we both respected. The rabbi's decision was learned and fair and we both abided by it. But I was still pissed off at the businessman for his insistence on not settling ahead of any litigation and insisting I was 100% liable. Some years later, after all debts had been paid, I ran into the businessman as we both waited to catch a train into the city, and we made small talk as if nothing ever happened. But I felt the anger bubble up inside me, and so, on the remainder of the train ride, during which I made a point of not sitting anywhere near the man, I wrote this lyric.