1. 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 the reaching trees
When a frigid shadow climbs right inside of me
That specter of recompense
It's a sound I 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 altar of human invention
An exhibition of erudition
Find me here, Son of Man
How far we fall


2. PSYCHESCAPE

I sank down the plane of delusion
Its 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?


3. 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
Spell-bound 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


4. 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


5. TOUT COMPRENDRE

(Instrumental)


6. 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
A child stumbles from the wreckage holding his salvation
The trigger to cessation
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


7. REDIVIDER

"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 a brokenness
That shelter of illusion
You see me, see you splitting myself even
There is me, forgiving nothing
Manic then depressive, hopelessly 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 away ran 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"


8. 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 specter, 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 specter, 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


9. C'EST TOUT PARDONNER

(Instrumental)


10. ORPHAN

Respective perspectives worshiping 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


11. NO PLACE TO BREATHE

I saw you stumble out from the social slaughterhouse
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
Classes 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?


12. 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
Its 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


13. 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