1. THE WELL

Mother, tell me a 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, you are, you are, you are
I'm not, but you are
I'm not, but you are
Dead to conceive life that tells our stories
Dead to conceive life that tells our 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


2. 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
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?


3. I DROWNED IN THE DESERT

(Instrumental)


4. NATIVE BLOOD

The barren wastes bearing down on me
Cracks in the clouds leave me wondering
Did the oceans dry out, 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


5. 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


6. 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 to 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
'Cause 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 this 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
'Cause I'm coming home to you, does this cup run dry?

For they know not what they do


7. 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?


8. FIRST MOTHER (LILITH)

Awake, awake your eyes or be 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; captured

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? Should I die alone?
Life to death or flesh to decompose, you've captured me


9. TO THIRST FOR THE SEA

(Instrumental)


10. 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


11. 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
But as my looking glass 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, oh no, no, nevermore
You see, I have this reoccurring dream
Where we snuck past scores of slumbering guards
And fixed that rustic iron key and 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, my terror turned to madness
When I awoke I was swinging at shrouded silhouettes and stumbled out the door
My anger was extinguished by this downpour
Compelled, void of volition
My steps propelled me 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's abandoned, they moved singular and perpetual
Around a dark blue flame where I heard you call my name

"'Cause I am the fire that is never quenched
And I am the river that will not run dry"
And 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