1. 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


2. 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 grows on the vine of humankind
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 grows on the vine of humankind
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


3. 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 classist— 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 the 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 into 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 into the jaws of the beast
The war machine that turns for eternity


4. AFTERDUST

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.


5. 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 the 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.


6. LOOK OUTSIDE: DREAM

(Instrumental)


7. 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 a 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

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

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


8. 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


9. SHARE THE BODY

Watching from the bottom of a strangers 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 or blacking out the friction
She's clutching a bottle - conscripted prescription
Deaf to my dissent, void of all volition
Injecting fire straight into the veins
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 make sure 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 make sure 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"


10. 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 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.


11. 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 me 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 the 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.


12. LOOK INSIDE: AWAKE

(Instrumental)


13. 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 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.


14. 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.