1. SENT LIKE THE CRAVEN SWINE THEY WERE

O, patriarch! Give me back the key [to] sweet centuries stolen out from under me.

Every year, it repeats: I heard its name when you whispered it to me.
I swore I would remember, but again it slipped away.
I felt it in my grasp, now I miss it every day.

Do you recall how it felt?
In my life, the horrors I've beheld collapsed upon their knees before the image I'd been shown. I wasn't sure, now I know.

You must have forgotten: did they pluck it from your head?
Sequestered among us, between the living and the dead.
I walked that narrow pathway, I beckoned down the stairs. I smelled you there.

I closed my eyes to take a break. I fell asleep and drifted far away, I had another dream that this machine would fall apart. I was screaming, and my car wouldn't start.

This disease is getting worse. I've got a habit to support that I've made a curse. They say they will, but they'll never find a cure for this disease. This is it: you're released.

Every day, it repeats: I go there when I sleep, I taste it when I eat. At first I could remember all the things that slipped away. I cannot think, I cannot say.

Do you recall how I felt? Was I real? Did you melt? Am I here? Do you see?

Still desperate not to be.


2. YEAR OF VISIONS

Silence deep in the fold. We are all bred stunted, feral and cold: empty-headed.

A year of visions from you of cold hands around mine in parallel universes colder and darker, or warmer and brighter.

My world shrinks and it reverses.

Cruelly pledge your oath of fealty.

All paths end the same: indifferently.

Oh, what an agony it is to be perceived as anyone at all.

There you were, overlooking all the amber waves of grain. Twisting at the windmills, a monument. For the fevers, bleed.

You weren't mad, just worried.

Dead and buried.

A year of visions from you: Your cold hands around mine in parallel universes colder and darker, or warmer and brighter.

My world shrinks, and it reverses.

Cruelly asked your oath of fealty. You wept and I looked indifferently.

I fled to consecrate it. I felt it growing in my head. I heard it whisper while I tried to sleep. Metastasizing.


3. WASHED IN GOLD BEFORE THE BELL

(No lyrics available)


4. DO NOT BE LULLED THAT YOU DO NOT SEE OPEN FLAMES

This place is quiet at night. Soft, like the underbelly, like the heaving, labored breaths. The earth, the sun, the light -- the unforgiving pull of it.

Boots pressed onto chests.

I remember driving and falling asleep. On the highway to Michigan, you and me. I bet we drifted into the traffic like a sailboat. Felt like I almost had it -- I wouldn't know because I had passed out and you were so tired. You slept at a cheap motel.

When it seeps into everything you touch, it becomes its own thing. But it starts as a crutch.

He heard it outside after all of the kids went to bed. He could've ignored it, but he let it get in his head.

This place is quiet at night, soft like the underbelly, or the hospital’s heaving, labored breaths.

We're all burning. Do not be lulled that you cannot see open flames.
They're weeping -- the billions drowning underneath the waves.
The needless congregate to plot and sell the dead. They hate you: don't let them get into your head.