-The Well-

Mother, tell me story or sing me a song
It's a sacred sort of disorder how these sisters came along
Of flocks of fools, and dozens of men
Who fell through their thrones into the abyss of again
The kings of earth, crippled with crowns
And the cursed criminal who turned it upside down

So we shout, "Hold us together, tear me apart"
May our suffering sing the hymns we couldn't hear
"Hold us together even if it tears me apart"
May our blood be spilled for the life of this world

"Do you feel whole? Will you see my face?"
You are, I'm not, but you are
Dead to conceive life that tells out stories

"Hold us together, tear me apart"
May our suffering sing the hymns we couldn't hear
"Hold us together even if it tears me apart"
May our blood be spilled for the life of this world

-XX (City Grave)-

This injustice renders my thoughts ineffectual
Forgive me, Lover, and forget my sullen face
Privilege brings us to this place of human currencies
We buried our sisters in a glass display
Only to evaporate to a toxic skyline
Underneath we sell off the bodies

My body became a graveyard where they buried thirsty souls
Show me your righteous leader; I'll show you the bullet holes
The preacher with the parched tongue and the "God" that he controls
"Shake off the sin, shake off the sin"
And spit out your cacophony of lies

I'll climb through your screen
And bleed out the image you left in me

But God, are you man? Then how do you see me?
From where you sit up in heaven, looking down on my hell
My body chokes back
"I have nothing to draw with and the well is deep
Where can I get living water?"

Enslaved in the "Land of the Free"
My prison is our wedding bed where you left me for dead
You'll leave us for dead
Apathy was our anchor to a digital sea
Where you drown in the comfort of our complicity

Can Love save me?
Will Your wrath avenge us?

-I Drowned In The Desert-

[Instrumental]

-Native Blood-

The barren wastes, bearing down on me
Cracks in the clouds leave me wondering
Did the oceans dry out and return to the sky
For a privileged perspective of our final goodbye?

Pretend it's a house of peace while she's buried underneath
You built your Father's house over my mother's grave

Bodies; a mass grave collapse the concave floor
These sanctimonious steeples will meet us in the dirt
Because the earth is trembling
If only we had eyes to see it shake
Ignorant until we expire

When the ocean fills our veins and the soil becomes my bones
Maybe we'll fall asleep tonight to the madness
In the melody poured out for slaves

We were dressed in potential now we're draped in sorrow
Our race is a bloodstain spattered on a profane political campaign
Manifest your destiny
Stripes and stars comprise my prison bars; the cost of liberty

Maybe we'll fall asleep tonight to the madness
In the melody poured out for slaves
Maybe this storm is a perfect score for wretched bodies washed ashore
Poured out for me

The life I loved looking up at me
Saplings struck like daggers hemorrhaging streams
As the breath of my people return to the ground
So forests can once more abound

The suffering cross that overcame
The name of love made concurrent with shame

This melody; I thought it familiar
It sounds like your heartbeat keeping time
Then you turn and remind me that this pain has a purpose
And maybe we'll fall asleep tonight

-Tiny Hands (Au Revoir)-

awoke in the summer the sun struck the earth
To furnish us with fire
But jealous hands fashioned their cross to a sword
Brandished their gift as a torch to burn the light
To the dead we owe only the truth; the human condition
Surveying the space between the nave
I saw my own infernal grave; existential imperfection
We sat scrawling out notes on scratched oak tombs
Bullets bouncing off stonewall saints laid to rest
By our Forebear at their children, at the dissidence of despair
This proximal milieu could close the door
To the closeness that keeps us inside the spaces that we hide
My heart burns cold as life leaves my daughter's eyes
I am the mother of the dying, the dust, the denouement
How can absence take my father's house?
How can nothing take my daughter's life?
Walk me out from this tomb
If you are the gate could you make a way?
Come down from that cross; hold out your hands so I can see

"Je suis sorti vivant du four crématoire
Je suis le témoin sacré de l'église
Je suis une mère qui a tout perdu"

This fire burns your name on my lips; this smoke chokes your song on my throat
Now let death lynch my lungs I offer what's left of this withering tongue
But oh, no exit so bright as the light that shines behind the Son
I leapt through stained glass saints to fall to the garden where we first begun

-Firstwake-

You'd be choking on your flame,
my Son without a name
Made king of all the wastes
And forever will swallow us alive, we'll be abstracted from time
We can let the tides wash over

This is the epilogue to the introduction
Lost in the sound
Hold tight all your systematic theories
That help you to sleep at night
But remember that there could be no sufficient certitudes in hell

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do
Mother, receive me because I'm coming home to you
Does this cup run dry?

Look at what we've done again
We wage war in the name of love
Using gold to fill the holes in your hands

Caught in the paradox; juxtaposed between bifurcated black and white
And my propensity to fail you
Caught in the cyclical narrative of violence
That invokes your name to justify genocide
They'll take everything

We traded water for salt
Something whole for something equally as broken as us
Now dying of thirst we'll write this out in blood
And shut you in a stone cold time where the air rots out
Leaving us alone
We chose to be alone
I was given to cup to quench parched
Tongues
But I became drunk and lust lynched my lungs

Father, forgive them
For they know not what they do
Mother, receive me, because I'm coming home to you
Does this cup run dry?
For they know not what they do

-Darkstrand (Hibakusha)-

My hand, held to the glare of this burnt impasse
Yours, necessarily on the other side of some sickly meta-xis
You're stopped in stasis, matched with mine
I'll quantify time with meter
With rhyme to calculate a way to prove that you are alive

Isolated, trapped between
A picture of you now stained on the street
Oh mother, teach me how to die
In your shadow I saw to a distant future
Your life was only a nominal fee
Singing the sound of silence, signaling the end
They took your life, mother, as a pretense to pretend
The hand that feeds us sat you down
Covered my eyes, thrusted the styli
Retraced the timeline to call it suicide

Will you wait for me?

Death was the chorus; our lives framed in refrain
Softly we sing notes better sung by our dead
I'd rather sleep and see you soon than die alone
In the wake of this nuclear catastrophe
We were meant to create, you spoke us out of nothing
Out of the chaos we've caused
Naked we came, shadows we leave

Salt of the earth: Preserve their songs
Light of the world: Burn out the shadows

Infinite echoes of stifled screams
The abyss you've created will ever stare back into me

-First Mother (Lilith)-

Awake, awake your eyes or forever fallen
Sister, can you see me through the boundaries of this garden?
When every man will take your voice, every God will fate your end
You planted paradox in the center of our humanity
My ambivalent proclivity for insufficiency

Should I sleep or should I die alone?
Life to death or flesh to decompose
You captured me

I'm awakened by a fate that screams
"You will bear the weight to give this world
A beating heart that never ends"
Now bring me a love that will live and die by my every word I speak
Won't you lie in this bed that we have made?
I must become something more than this

Should I sleep or should I die alone?
Life to death or flesh to decompose
You've captured me
Should I sleep or should I die alone?
Life to death or flesh to decompose
You've captured me

-To Thirst For The Sea-

[Instrumental]

-Wasteland (Vechnost)-

We "won the War"
We made a temple to thieves enshrining the great criminal
Who promised heaven without God

If we had sight to seem to see the seven seas
Could cease to be or freeze in me
We'd shake this sudden sundering
And subsequently cross the strait and traverse the wastes
We'll beat our rifles to shovels
Aand dig a proper grave for our sons who saw the end
Of God, wasteland
The flag will fall with the wall we built, wasteland

Apostate to the State, Witness to the Dead
For you know only a heap of broken image
And when you rid this earth of God we shall shelter Him underground

Fall into the coldest wastes of humanity
Darkening circles fed by deepening graves
"Death solves all problems", your heart is a statistic
No mother, no resistance, but still she precludes the grave

They saw the end of God, wasteland
The flag will fall with the walls we built, wasteland

-Depths II-

All the world was a dream I couldn't shake
In a midnight reverie of which I'll never wake
That started mundane enough with an incessant tapping
On the windowpane separating me from the storm

Where inside I sat, me the loathsome fool
With my head cocked sideways in confusion
As my looking glass³ became a two-way mirror
And you can watch me hide from everything on this living sphere
But don't you dare darken my doorstep
Stranger; never a step more, no, no, nevermore
You see, I have this reoccurring dream
Where we snuck past scores of slumbering guards
And fixed that rustic iron key to that lock to set you free
"I would bring you liberty!"
Where in reality I'm a coward
I'm collateral matter swayed by banalities of time and space
I'm a name without a face

My trepidation reached threshold and my terror turned to madness
When I awoke I was swinging at shrouded silhouettes
And stumbled out the door where my anger
Was extinguished by this downpour
Compelled, void of volition, my steps propelled through this chronic storm
Where there in the clearing; throughout the gaps in the trees
Dark smoke flickered from fire illuminating my unease
Like clockwork, seven sisters turned together in a circle
Autonomy abandoned, they moved singular and perpetual
Around a dark blue flame where I heard you call my name
"I am the fire that is never quenched
And I am the river that will not run dry"

When I slept in that garden
Lord did you see me as I was dreaming?

This is the end of everything
We'll lose our divisions and forget our names
The precipice of eternity
I caught fire, I caught fire, I caught fire and you'll watch me burn]

-Inherit The Earth-

After the fire, after the rain
After the sacred kissed the profane
When you came and left again
Such a captivating pain
After that night I left my comfort
To find where your body lies
I'd wander upon this grave then fall
I'd fall inside

I searched the clearing for that spark, hands sifted through the ash
Knowing what we felt was real but some delusions never pass
So I took shelter in the woods with the naked shaking trees
Deciduous, fraternal twins, we're both wilted, stem and leaf

Then the mist turned sleet turned snow
My senses shook numb, I've nothing to show
But a rain-stained book that once contained my literary charades
New blots of ink, archetypal shapes and shades
Bleed through each and every page and I ask myself
What's the weight of my life on the scales of eternity?

We inherit the earth, we inherit the war
I inhabit the wound, I dwell in the harm
Oh, how far we fall; we're casualties of time
Oh, how far we fall, begin to forgive existence

Retreat back from reaching trees
When a frigid shadow climbs right inside of me
That specter of recompense
It's a sound I've heard ever since

Amidst the endless mortal strife
And the constantly dying light
The truth we felt from the start
"How can I hold myself together when everything falls apart?"

We inherit the earth, we inherit the war
I inhabit the wound, I dwell in the harm
Oh, how far we fall; we're casualties of time
Oh, how far we fall, forgive existence

I wandered upon the alter of human invention
An exhibition of erudition, find me here (Son of Man)
How far we fall

-Psychescape-

I sank down the plane of delusion
It's vast expanses mocked my advances
And bid me, "Oh fragile mind
You will learn how to fracture"

Scrawled across the walls
The suffering saint cries out
"Is it madness to retreat
From the myopic gaze that holds us captive?"

Follow me
I'll take you to the edge of reason
Fall with me
We'll make a home in our delusion

I split my mind ten thousand times
But in every world there's no exit, no exit

No madness in a dream
No walls surround me to keep me safe
The straight line you draw for me
So perfect, so pure (Untie me from reality)

When every word is falling from your mouth
Don't let it become your escape

Make an escape from the monolith
Scale the lies of material despondency
I waited on the tracks for reason
But my train of thought, it never came, it never came

The straight line you draw for me
So perfect, so pure
So perfect, so pure

I'd change the world but I can't change myself
I saw you shout at the shadows
I'd change the world but I'm chained to myself
Define paranoia

Follow me
I'll take you to the edge of reason
Fall with me
But could the lips of God grace a withered fruit?

-Dying In Circles-

Beside the shadow of a frozen chapel
Under the marriage of the cross and crown
Outside the privilege of the "chosen ones"
The image of God is sleeping on the ground

Spires pierce the sky like steel through your hands
Planks from our eyes plunged in your side
Water poured out but we want wine
You said, "Take and remember" but we always forget

To the outcast sons, to the sojourners, descendants of loss
I'll hold my breath until you can breathe
To truly live I must begin anew and be consumed
Make a heart of flesh from these hollow stones
I'm learning what it means to trade my certainty for awe

When you fell to your knees to wash my feet
Did you see the trampled shadows stained underneath?
Did you hear the acrimony
Perpetuated by the puppet sewn to the pulpit?

We forgot your life and became a people of death
Spellbound by the celibate spectacle, inhabiting mausoleums

We are the eulogy at the funeral of God
To the outcast sons, to the sojourners
Descendants of loss: be consumed
I'll hold my breath, to truly live we must begin anew
Trade your certainty for awe

-Understanding Love As Loss-

Searching for solace in a toxic temple
Fragments of lead climbing through your head
Stones load your coat as you wade through the winter current
Dancing with the dead on the riverbed
Wanton hanging of the wise pale king
And I see myself

Here we dream in a bed of seamless sleep
The rain never wakes you (From your descent)
Sinking through subtle waves that disguise the current down below
You're pulled in the undertow

Intricate, I watched the world dance inside your head
Ephemeral, everything created must expire
Misery, losing hope for a dying world
Or did we lose hope in ourselves, my ineffable?

Words lose sound
With every fathom (Further down)

Torn between two worlds
Floundering in a state of metaxis
One is waning one is dead
In both we feel too much, we feel too much

Intricate, I watched the world dance inside your head
Ephemeral, everything created must expire
Misery, losing hope for a dying world
Or did we lose hope in ourselves, my ineffable?

Most nights we merge into one dream
You mouth that four word sundering
Soundless but somehow deafening
"I can't go on"

I'll strain my voice to make you relent
But the tide holds me in my dissent
We're bound to each other in the undertow
You were my ineffable

-Tout Comprendre-

[Instrumental]

-Panic Room-

Lustrous lines obscured by opaque blinds
Frozen metacarpals tap, tap, tap the window glass
Syncopated staccatos with the broken clock
Synchronized with my post-traumatic ticks, ticks

Talking to the space in the room
That echoes back indiscernibly to my disconnected self, self
It's self-consuming, what's ensuing is my undoing
The nightly casualty of war

And it sounds like this: War, endless war

In my endless dance with entropy
I must rescind my sentience; the sickness that I know

Rearrange the disarray
Of disintegrated senses
Puzzle pieces, spectral splinters
Of a soldier's worn and tattered soul

In my endless dance with entropy
I must rescind my sentience; the sickness that I know

Machines of air looking down on us
The beasts of dust as we grapple heel and hand
Mud and sand, blood red oil
The chaff of the harvest

Converted to currencies of wealthy means
Stepping stones cut from our perforated bones
Riches are reaped beside our bodies
Sown just to be thrown back again

And forgotten if we stumble in, laid inside a homeless nest
Stuck with eager dirty needles, shipped to an early steeple
Where boxes close; descend with grace
As you defend yourself, both charitable and chaste

Praise me for my valor, lay me on a crimson tower
Justify my endless terror as my "finest hour"
Treat me as a token to deceive the child
Whom we fatten for this scapegoat slaughter

I learned to fight, I learned to kill, I learned to steal
I learned that none of this is real, none of this is real
None of this is real, none of this is real
But there's a war inside my head

Beleaguered by my breathing, choking, screaming, heaving
Time drags me back to the desert (This is war)
A child stumbles from the wreckage holding his salvation
The trigger to cessation (To end us all)

I took a life that takes mine
Every quiet moment we collapse
Have you forsaken us?
All the darkness comes alive
Take my hand, drag me to the void

-REDIVIDEЯ-

"I am autonomous," You told Father
First immortal but now fleeting
All creation reveals me about this said time
Called Death, cursed the reverse
All we bought was brokenness

That shelter of illusion

You see me see You splitting myself even
There is me, forgiving nothing
Manic then depressive; helplessly sinking
Sister Moon, Brother Sun

Eclipsed one another
Forgiving one another

Tides receding
Death ran away then life flooded in world
This I am: imbalanced
Beautifully so, hands connected, perhaps
Then dead reflections saw You
I did, didn't I?

I didn't, did I?
You saw reflections dead then
Perhaps, connected hands
So beautifully imbalanced: am I this world?
In flooded life then ran away Death
(Receding tides)

Another one forgiving, another one eclipsed
Sun Brother, Moon Sister, sinking helplessly
Depressive then manic, nothing forgiving me
Is there even myself, splitting? You see me see You

Illusion of shelter: that brokenness was bought
"We all reverse the cursed death called time," said this about me
Reveals creation, all fleeting now but immortal
First Father told You, "Autonomous am I"

-Nervosa-

Look straight through me, look at the nightmare
Our past is but a dream that we're trying to escape
Trying to evade to erase ourselves
Look through me and see the advent of our obsessions
Behold, your child; perfection; a rotting shell of atrophy

Watching crowds like crows
We furiously flock to tragedy
Observe the hurt then hasten back
To our peaceful, quiet nests of blasphemy

Scapegoat, rather die and know
Drag your failing body in tow
Witnessing the wake
Conflagrate the ready oil at the stake

Binging, the culmination of purging
What our lusts have borne
We hoarded all the world
To find we'd lost any semblance of ourselves

This dying dance

I am not my own reflection
I am not myself, I am not myself
No, I am haunted by a non-existent lover
The spectre, the ghost, the soul-starving host
I am haunted by a non-existent lover
I was gifted with the vision but cursed to be the witness
(Invisible to me)

I'll be pale to match the walls
And warped to trace the beams
Flushed to fit across the floor
So you can step right over me
Scouring this filthy slate
These crooked bones they won't break straight
Cracked and splintered like our house
Upended by that first summer squall

Fading, so thin, you could snap me into the shape you need
Gaunt enough to slide through that wedding dress
Then stitch me to a fraying matrimony
Embalmed inside a never-ending ceremony

I am not my own reflection
I am not myself, I am not myself
No, I am haunted by a non-existent lover
The spectre, the ghost, the soul-starving host
I am haunted by a non-existent lover
I was gifted with the vision but cursed to be the witness

Invisible to me
Invisible to me
Invisible to me

-C'Est Tout Pardonner-

[Instrumental]

-Orphan-

Respective perspectives worshipping directives
Blindly killing for our dogma until our sons meet in the garden

Torches scald the night sky
The youth rise up and set their elders to the gallows
Fire in the lighthouse
All our advances, a spark away from conflagration

In the night I saw you fall, oh wicked star
Illuminate our hate, show us who we really are

Books were burned away, only swords remained
The prophets died for peace, stabbed by preying priests
As the wise man said, I'll keep my heart and lose my head
Without a neck how can I sink
With a millstone to the bottom of the sea?

The bottom of the sea
And I'm finding the violence, it looks like me

Singing songs of life when all we know is death
A world of orphans left empty-handed
If love's a sin I'll become a heretic

Recurring intervention
Framing the narrative to cleanse our tainted conscience
Harvesting destruction
Reaping the sow from weapons planted in the soil

Terrified little son
Encumbered by your sword
You can hide your fear but won't shed the sheer
Weight of your own humanity, humanity
You can face me towards the mountains
Where I meet our mother's gaze
Too blinded by this hatred
To recognize your brother's face

Singing songs of life when all we know is death
A world of orphans left empty-handed

I'll collapse, head parting from my weary shoulders
Seeds of life spilling from my palms
Subverting love will take hold in this hateful soil
My blood is the water, inshallah, shalom

Love will take hold

-No Place To Breathe-

I saw you stumble out from the social
slaughter house
Oppression's progeny, you lift your head and plead for mercy
Rocks began as building blocks until they turned to throwing stones
A monolith of dominance we set atop your plinth of bones

This privilege is a prism, reflecting our indecision
The iniquities of inhibition, our indifference gave way to a prison
classNamees at war, castes are born, criminals are sworn in

Place your hands to the pulse of this city
Keep your ear to the ground, hear her gasp
"I can't breathe, I can't breathe"
Are we so blind to believe that violence could give birth to peace?

Lay down our weapons and raise our arms
Make every breath a protest
In a world where your neighbors cannot breathe

Every second in the shadows, lives are stolen in the sun
Slowly waking from our apathy to see the fascists have won
They already won; just ask the child in front of the smoking gun

Are we so blind to believe that violence could give birth to peace?

Place your hands to the pulse of this city
Keep your ear to the ground, hear him gasp
"I can't breathe, I can't breathe"
We shout at fascist hands fixed on asphyxiating those in need

Place your hands to the pulse of this city
Keep your ear to the ground, hear them gasp
"I can't breathe, I can't breathe"
Are we so blind to believe that violence could give birth to peace?

I've seen the end, the tyrant on his knees
Will we starve our need for retribution
Or take his eye and all go blind?

-First Father-

Do you remember when I said
You'd never feel the sting of death?
But now I'm waiting where you left
Beside that snow-kissed clearing

I pressed a seed through that frozen fleece
The earth embraced you in the ground
No invention of my mind
Will ever compose a melody so profound

I'm a priest afraid to pray
Terrified at what the silence couldn't say
Tongue tethered to the skeptic beating in my chest

We're no longer quite ourselves
Nor reflections of someone else
Lover, do you feel that tension
As we drift between silence and eternity?

Death is the road, road to awe

I stood atop the world
It's asymmetry laid bare in front of me
Thanatophobic societies
Taking life to mourn their tragedies

I feared this world would never change
But you steady your resolve anyway
Let's set the pen against the sword
How orphans long for peace before they learn to love the war

Perhaps it's our language
Perhaps we are incomplete
Words like shadows to what we see
Faint flickerings across the cavern in our minds

Candles in the dark
Defiant to the night

"You pulled me through time", through the edgeless night
I learned to love as you learned to die
I'll begin to feel again
And finish the chapter you couldn't write

Candles in the dark
Defiant to the night
Defiant to the shadow

You pull me through time, through the edgeless night
I learned to love as you learned to die

-Inhabit The Wound-

My son, my son
Borne from the war, we trade shovels for swords
My son, my son
Inherit the earth, inhabit the wound

Oh, how far we fall
We fall

My love, my love
Captive to lusts: consumed
My love, my love
Buried beneath the vile machine

The earth with a final gasp shook free from our inventions
Grace and nature reconciled, I heard, "It is finished"
The final seal was broken, the concussion blew me back
I teetered on the edge of recreation and the wrath

Nine Lovers stumbled out from their shells of brokenness
They reached inside their wounds
To find the seeds borne from their suffering
Coalesce upon me to plant the tree of life
Inside the heart of the machine

Reach inside, heal the wound
Make us whole

-Thus Spoke-

Two years lost in a lightless sleep
Not a star in sight since the Fall of the Machine
Creation and invention collide to provide
A gap in existence, a ripple in time

As matter collapsed, I fell inside
Crossing in a distant, deathless, dimensional divide
Where the sum of gravity granted passage and bowed
The night God slept, everything was sound

When the end began, when the end began
When the end began, when the end began
When the end began, when the end began
When the end began, when the end began

When the end began, when the end began
When the end began, when the end began
When the end began, when the end began
When the end began, when the end began

-The New Eternity-

Mother, tell me,
why do the waters make us sick?
Who bleeds the heavens, making the clouds rain pestilence?
Dropping fever like manna from the morning sky
Gather your children and hold them as they die

Panic humming in the palm of my hand
Silent vectors injected with the curse of man
Bodies dissected, heartbeats redirected
The past was dead, why did we resurrect it?

Strange fruit grows on the vine of humankind
Beneath a bright synthetic sky, I saw the future die

A web of wires in our mind
Weaves an empire down our spine
I fear we've sealed our fate
There's no escape, there's no escape: The New Eternity

Strange fruit is growing on the vine
Beneath a bright synthetic sky
I fear we've sealed our fate
There's no escape, there's no escape: The New Eternity

Germinating extinction

The people unite when you dose them with fear
Relinquish their will, let their objections disappear
Crowds galvanized by vapid words and septic slurs
Utterly transfixed by the fiction of the "greater good"

Estranged in this age, we set sail to the stars
Return to the earth, still unaware of who we are
We've come too far, we've come too far, we've come too far, it's all I know
The darkness didn't die, no, we brought it home

I sowed a secret deep in the earth
But despite the world, it grew
I knew all things could be made new
All things will be made new

A web of wires in our mind
Weaves an empire down our spine
I fear we've sealed our fate
There's no escape, there's no escape: The New Eternity

Strange fruit is growing on the vine
Beneath a bright synthetic sky
I fear we've sealed our fate
There's no escape, there's no escape: The New Eternity

Cross the Great Divide and see
Light and Dark collide in me
Shake the shroud of secrecy
Uproot the grim hegemony

The New Eternity

-Northern Fires (Guernica)-

Ration my breath,
terror clandestine in my chest
Mangled, I lay on a foreign forest floor
Caught in an instant, divided by distance
Alone in the fray, clutching my trigger, I pray
As I make amends with death on a distant shore

Such is the fate of the nation state
Despite the myths they propagate
The narrative never fits the crime
Democracy's died this death a thousand times

The masses kneel before the golden cross
Held by the priest who bows at the feet of the king

We stand alone in the dust of what could be
Fighting to find our humanity

Bury me with my name in an unmarked grave
Another casualty to the vanity of history
The war marches on after the killing ends
Take our lives, colonize our minds

I've been digging through timelines, historical bylines
I find the fatal flaw in our design lies
Between thoughts we had and words we knew
Between what we're told and what is true

Who fuels the fascist? A classNameist
Inculcating the masses in passes
Under the contrived countenance of contrition

The victor writes the story, more often burns the manuscript
Set fire to a pyre, cremate the crimes that they commit
But the flames kept us warm
So we bit our tongues and tasted scorn

The bitter stench of finite men
Betrayed by the thieves they swore to defend
The bell will toll and in the end
Lay only echoes of what could have been

We stand alone in the dust of what could be
Fighting to find our humanity
We stand alone in the dust of what could be
Nothing we fought for will set us free

Throw myself headlong to the jaws of the beast
The war machine that feeds for eternity
Throw myself headlong to the jaws of the beast
The war machine that turns for eternity

Throw myself headlong to the jaws of the beast
The war machine that feeds for eternity
Throw myself headlong to the jaws of the beast
The war machine that turns for eternity

-Afterdusk-

First the auspices,
they came dripping from the sky
Set their course to the coast, black sand blazing in their eyes
We woke and bore witness to a tarnished veil of gold
Tiny corpses line the strand, obsolescence unfolds

Intravenously, hypodermic pipelines seep toxins to the sea
Adorning our shores with negligence
Suffocate, immolate, cauterize the surface
Poison dances in the sky

Walk with me, walk with me and see
Our colonies breeding dystrophy
Can you feel, feel the disconnect
Resonate, burn inside your chest?

Palpitating, palpitating pulse
Failing heart, cardiac convulse
The violence we love, it's cyclical
We rise and we fall, it's inevitable

Is it fatal?
Is the fallout inevitable?
"It was all for nothing"
Spiraling out of control

Misdirected decathect, both indirect and circumspect
Oh architect of disconnect, in retrospect I now suspect

Trace the hills with your hungry eyes
Witness how, like an orphan's spine
Cities protrude on the horizon line
Greed will rise and carve out the sky
Blinding us to the repercussion

Pull the blood from the earth
Leave a grave for your sons
Oil is the ink, fueling missiles like pens
Writing oblivion

Walk with me, walk with me and see
Our colonies breeding dystrophy
Can you feel, feel the disconnect
Resonate, burn inside your chest?

Palpitating, palpitating pulse
Failing heart, cardiac convulse
The violence we love, it's cyclical
We rise and we fall, it's inevitable

Is it fatal?
Is the fallout inevitable?
"It was all for nothing"
Spiraling out of control

Is it fatal?
Is the fallout inevitable?
"It was all for nothing"
Spiraling out of control

This violence we love, it's cyclical
We rise and we fall, it's inevitable
The violence we love, it's cyclical
We rose just to fall

I followed the harm to the site of infection
The exit wounds where we made our home
We were gorged with the earth and drunk off the seas
And now we die with the taste of decay on our tongues

-Visible Unseen-

Speak to me
In a language only Lovers can understand
Dance with me
In a rhythm only Lovers can comprehend

One fist gripping defiance
Other cradling the sacred inside of our hands
Pariah

It's the pain of becoming
Confronting what stirs within
I wanted to show you apocalypse
So you could see just how this ends; as it begins

No place to rest your head
No respite for an anathema
Banished for the sin of honesty
From the citadel of little hidden hells

Pyroglyphic, I saw Your face inside the fire
Monolithic, a dominance that dictates desire
Ultimatum, dual damnations dichotomize me
Suffocation, crushed beneath holy hypocrisy

This isn't love, this is escape
Exiled into the night
Left to navigate a world that negates our needs
The Visible Unseen

You're the weight I'll always carry
Through a world so cold, you'll never walk alone
We will find a place to lay our heavy heads
These lonely roads will always lead you home

Am I only flawed when I am alive
Only Your child if I live denied?
I ask of You, Benevolence
Was I made just to be broken?

Our faith became a silver shield
Insulated from compassion
Praising the prosperity
Repressing their identity

I'll show you hell is a place
It's in the secrets we keep
Oh God, how those secrets keep me
This isn't love, this is escape

This isn't love, this is escape
Coerced conformity
Fixed on the dust in their eye
Forest fires rage in mine

I never thought to ask
When you said she was asleep, did you hear my disbelief?
The bitter irony
That I wait for God as she dies beside me

You're the weight I'll always carry
Through a world so cold, you'll never walk alone
We will find a place to lay our heavy heads
These lonely roads will always lead you home

We found our place in the disconnect of neglect
These lonely roads will always lead you home
Until our paths converge, give me eyes to see the Visible Unseen
These lonely roads will always lead you home

Speak to me
In a language only Lovers can understand
One fist gripping defiance
Other cradling the sacred inside of our hands

-Look Outside: Dream-

[Instrumental]

-Vanity Of Sleep-

This is a love affair with consumer despair
An emptiness I can call my own
An arbitrary sanctuary
Where we deposit prayers to a dispensable God

Welcome to the end stage age
Where joy is a pill and love's a prescription
Vaccinated with an outward suspicion
Isolation became our pre-existing condition

Manifested drudge of my
Mass-manufactured consent
But there's a gaping hole in my consciousness
A deep that cries out to deep

This is a love affair with consumer despair
An emptiness I can call my own
An antidote for mystery
Our indifference is deafening

(אהיה אשר אהיה)
There's a presence here, it stirs inside the static dissonance
Of discontent that refused to relent

I built a home overlooking a graveyard
To remind myself I'm still alive
Yet you see a flaw still abides
As I witness an ending that I can't contrive

We watched a golden array of a casket parade
As wealth makes its final display to the ground
I found it strange, that even in this place
Death became such a gainful exchange

Give me something to hold, give me something that bleeds
I'll scour the earth for my identity
Is there a cure for a sick society?

So rich in this world, so in debt to ourselves
The network of life in such a disconnect
How many times must we die this death?

Annihilation is all we are
Desolation is everything I know

All we are is all we love
And everything I know is destructible
Artificial heart, obsidian soul
Encircled by dreams that are combustible

We trade the Garden for Cities, the Tree for a Tower
Surrendered our faith, became addicted to power
I know that hope grows inside of the Wound
And I know progress is empty, I must Be Consumed

So I'll dig through these masks till I find my face
Separate from the false pretense I embraced
It kills me to know that you'll never find peace
You can have all the world but you'll never be free

Tear the stitches sewn across my existence
Cut me out from this nothingness
Dusk will come and lay to rest
Our fleeting, fading silhouettes

-In Absence-

Find me in the silence,
tell me where I've been
The air is growing colder, the clouds are caving in
I lost the sound of your voice in the winter sun
I dreamed that dawn would wake us but morning never comes

I watched you go away
I watched the colors fade
I can't bear the pain of losing yesterday
To a world of grey

I found you in the shadows, following a ghost
I thought you felt my presence but we were still alone
Where do you turn when the corners of the room run from you?
And how it burns to be a memory lost in a mind you never knew

I watched you go away
I watched the colors fade
I can't bear the pain of losing yesterday
To a world of grey

My fading sunset
Swaying precarious in the sand
Every grain a lingering moment
Slipping through the cracks in my hand

Disintegrating in the predawn light
A memory eroded by time
I'll turn with your reversing clock
And describe the color when you can't see the sunrise

I watched you go away

I watched you go away
I watched the colors fade
I can't bear the pain of losing yesterday
To a world of grey

-Share The Body-

Watching from the bottom of a stranger's mind
Vicarious life, chemical divide
The epidemic of our time
A voluntary genocide

He's wielding a needle, it's laced with ambition
Set on finding forever, blacking out the friction
She's clutching a bottle; conscripted prescription
Deaf to my dissent, void of all volition

Injecting fire straight into the vein
Nothing will cauterize the wound where I remain
Ingesting tiny stars, one by one
One by one, I come undone

Passenger to my own life
Trapped inside, fastened to the vice
Fading out, fading away
Burning in a bliss you can't sustain

Am I a hedonist or solipsist?
Barbiturate tourniquets
Drip, drip; a sycophant's sea of delusion
Drowning in an empty conclusion

Come shoot me up into the night

Blood Moon; the shadow in my skin
The window of my soul was sealed but I'll still let you in
Blood Moon; shiver through my mind
Only the need is real, feel whatever I can to ensure I can't feel

All the hell in my veins
Can't dissipate the pain
All the hell in my veins
Won't wash away your face

So let us go then, you and I
Watch the sky drift into sleep, etherized
Collapsing stars, condemned to their cosmic graves
Bleeding light for the gain of some far off race

The fog hangs like thieves, there must be guilt in these streets
Place your hand on my wrist, it's not like we'll be missed
Do I dare shake the need from our skin?
Do I dare rattle the rust corroding me within?

The lechery, the treachery, oh come, Love, sit next to me
This anatomy is built like tragedy
Don't you know me by these scars, these marks where I are?
I mean I am, I mean I was, I was supposed to be someone

Blood Moon; the shadow in my skin
The window of my soul was sealed but I'll still let you in
Blood Moon; shiver through my mind
Only the need is real, feel whatever I can to ensure I can't feel

Every fix is a prayer, every high a sacrifice
We worship desire at the altar of dependence

I hit the bottom then it hit me back

Incarnation of society
"The face of evil is the face of need"

-Firstborn (Ya'aburnee)-

You bury me

Glass clouds shed their autumn skin
Kiss the mourning stems as they bow to the wind
Heads hung like wartime mothers
As the congregants struggle to console one another

We're bandaged together, soothing the surcease
Huddled inside the fog, beneath the barren trees
Budding youth, unfettered by absolutes
Do branches wither first when there's blood on the roots?

Can you stretch a moment into a thousand?
"Away from the quiet collapse of it all"
I know the Know who knows you, I see the See who sees you
I'll follow you into forever

I memorized your pain
I put my thoughts inside your name
Little Light, can't you see?
You're supposed to be the one who buried me

I tried to stop the flood
I tried to pull you from the tide
Now you paint the sky with distant fire

The room lay quiet, sowing silence
Watching lifelines stream through wilting arteries
Dreams crash with awe behind your roving eyes
How I envy the calm that occupies your mind

Drifting just above the flatline
That keeps your thoughts displaced from mine
I can't divert the current
I divide and wash ashore

I'll try to write you to rest
Plant you inside my prose
Yet my resolve, does it shake
Beneath a four foot casket shadow

The ink has spilled across the page
Shaping surviving sun to shade
Valleys and peaks, in grief
Descend into a ceaseless sleep

See how the night unfolds
Constellations welcome you home
Adrift in the river beyond our memories
You bury me

I memorized your pain
I put my thoughts inside your name
Little Light, can't you see?
You're supposed to be the one who buried me

I tried to stop the flood
I tried to pull you from the tide
Now you paint the sky with distant fire

I memorized your pain (I memorized your pain)
I put my thoughts inside your name (Thoughts inside your name)
Little Light, can't you see? (Can't you see?)
You're supposed to be the one who buried me (You bury me)

I tried to stop the flood (You bury me)
I tried to pull you from the tide (You bury me)
Now you paint the sky with distant fire

(You bury me)

-Lower Empire-

Bind the wrist, cut the tongue,
call it Liberation
Bind the wrist, cut the tongue, call it Liberation

Invader, you dare make me a stranger
Invader, you brand me as a traitor

These borders were forged in loss
Painted with a martyr's forgotten blood
Legions of stone infecting the land
Legions we carved into the palm of God's hand

Stigmata cities stitched together with wails intent
On sanitizing the sedition of our dark traditions
We begin with the purest of intentions
Then fabricate the cruelest inventions

Interpret the subtext: S-O-S
Euthanized with euphemistic lies
Populace of blank binary minds
Appetite for endless apathy

Breathing in, in insecurity

Until you see your reflection through the scope of a weapon
Nothing will ever change
A revolution stirs in the silence
The movement defies this negative space

I hear you through the noise
The truth that speaks in silence
Scale the divides we devise
We locked out thee world but we're locked inside

I hear you through the noise
The hope sung from the margins
My heartbeat just a step behind
I didn't know your name but I knew we were out of time

Nuclear families split apart like the atom
Demagogues proliferate the calloused grip of the state
The future asphyxiates under nativist suspicions
Insipid minds, domestic fission

Bind the wrist, cut the tongue, call it Liberation
Bind the wrist, cut the tongue, call it Liberation

Thirteen, cold as a stillborn
Wounds still warm in his chest
Behold the crimson lens, peer through the gaps in the flesh
Bullets raining from Babylon; the price of wealth

How can you resist this cycle
If you can't resist yourself?

What a world we knew before we fearfully withdrew
To our silent cells of solitude but still I hear you, I hear you

I hear you through the noise
The truth that speaks in silence
Scale the divides we devise
We locked out thee world but we're locked inside

I hear you through the noise
The hope sung from the margins
My heartbeat just a step behind
I didn't know your name but I knew we were out of time

-Look Inside: Awake-

[Instrumental]

-The Anatomy Of Time (Babel)-

Certain was the fear trembling in
your father's chest
Encountering the ancients in a graveyard for those who never rest
Even the wind lay still as time
Revealed the fools we are

Quiet monoliths appear, suspended in the air
Solemn in their countenance, impervious to fear
Marveling at the symmetry that binds and brings us here
Separating threads of space, distinctions disappear

Take all of your answers, throw them in the flames
I'll keep the questions, I'll take the rain
Defend all your doctrines, those lies you had sworn
I'll wander through the night, I'll sleep in the storm

I'll follow you to the end
I'll weather the world (I'll sleep in the storm)
I'll follow you to the end
Where time has no beginning

I pulled the past apart, futures unraveled with its plans
To my chagrin, the answers felt hollow in my hands
Adorned with memories that form the tapestry of life
Collective accounts of consciousness from virtue to vice

"Where are you now?" My voice echoed in that canyon
I turned to find you lynched, choking with abandon
The scope of time, at first profuse, now twisted to the shape of a noose
We wanted to see forever but instead we saw the truth

Species of the nightmare
People of the dream
Language is your prison, but also the key
Confront the heart of fear, behold the shape of destiny

Spinning in the circles, waltz with the sun
There's no time, many turn to one

Take all of your answers, throw them in the flames
I'll keep the questions, I'll take the rain
Defend all your doctrines, those lies you had sworn
I'll wander through the night, I'll sleep in the storm

I'll follow you to the end
I'll weather the world (I'll sleep in the storm)
I'll follow you to the end
Where time has no beginning

-Depths III-

I knew one truth and that truth was the sea
Cold and knowing, it saw the coward in me
And as the stain of epochs lines my tongue
I choked heavy on the past, too numb to speak back

We're each abandoned by the hands of time
That set us down to sail circles across a straight line
Sister moon, are we all that's left?
Just a silent satellite and the sigh of flesh

Come down and rest your lunar head on my breast
Listen to the terror tear at my chest
Our masts in tatters, oars shattered, feel free to pull me back
To the vast, unforgiving mass

Should we call this art, my falling apart?
The tangents of an imbalanced heart
As matter multiplied, I divide but I digress
The deprivation is taking effect

You said if I stood against my darkness
Not all of me would die
But all I see on the surface is a shadow
And it occurs to me this could mean suicide

When you went quiet I turned to silence
Seven sisters draw me back across the moor
Could you still love me in my leaving?
Would you remember me by the moments we forgot?

And as the waves slapped at my raft
I cursed the fate, like our vows, they broke at the bow
Flanked by the mist, I inhaled the breath of existence
Then you called me for one last time

I am the wind, the Be and the Still
I am the Depths, the Immeasurable Will
And when I awoke in that Garden
Lord, did you see me as I was dreaming?

I locked eyes with the storm, the sky sank down
To receive the fury of the sea
The abolition of my being
The precipice of eternity

Incandescence burst through the black
The veil was torn as the void collapsed
The rains will subside, be my eyes
Show me hope in the maw of the night

Our fractured pasts fall into one
A dozen stars collide as a perpetual sun
And as we disintegrate
Will you be the Fire that burns in my lungs?

Breathe me in
Watch me burn
Come breath me in, breathe me in
You'll watch me burn