1. TINY HANDS (AU REVOIR)

I 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 imperfections
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
And 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 leaped through stained glass saints
To fall to the garden where we first began


2. FROM TIDES

(Instrumental)


3. DARKSTRAND (HIBAKUSHA)

Creation creates a void
My hand held to the glare of this burnt impasse; yours
Necessarily on the other side of some sickly metaxis
You're caught in stasis, matched with mine
Quantify time with meter and 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 frames in refrain
Softly we sing notes better sung by our dead
I'd rather sleep and see you soon than die alone
In the waste of this nuclear catastrophe
We were made to create
You spoke us out of nothing
Out of the chaos we caused
Naked we came, shadows we leave

Salt of the Earth: preserve their songs
Light of world: burn out the shadows
Infinite echoes of stifled screams
The abyss you created will ever stare back into me

Will you wait for me?


4. TO CAVES

(Instrumental)


5. 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
And dig a proper grave for our sons

Who saw the end of God: Wasteland
The flag will fall with the walls 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
Still, she precludes the grave

They saw the end of God: Wasteland
The flag will fall with the walls we built: Wasteland
Wasteland