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METAZOA
All music: Cormorant (Nick Cohon, Brennan Kunk
All lyrics: Arthur von Nagel
Scavengers Feast
A million shells like stones in sand,
The soil painted by severed hands,
(Red)
Locusts breed in a child's skull,
A hallowed tank, rats in its hull,
(All dead)
Wars keep the vultures fed.
Friends and foes, all extinguished:
Mother Nature can't distinguish…
…Between a killer and a priest.
Heroes are the victor's butchers,
All their rapes and all their tortures
Cleansed by rains of gold and years of rot.
The human god mirrors the human brain.
Pray for power and material gain,
So the rich die old, and the poor die shot.
An armed cadaver on a fleshless horse,
Father Time knows no remorse
For rifts of West and East.
So the scavengers feast.
A martyred saint's but a jackal's meal,
And for all man's pride and religious zeal
Both the church and whorehouse burned.
The flies, the ants, the carrion thrive,
Hornets dig a ribcage hive,
And the world, the world still turns.
When all mankind tastes the earth,
Mother Nature will give birth
To another king of beasts.
And still the scavengers feast.
~~~
Uneasy Lies the Head
Liberté,
Egalité,
Fraternité :
Quelles belles idées!
La tyrannie du peuple.
He once fed the scaffold
On Revolution Square,
But now the crowds cackle
At his skull shaved bare,
At his shirt torn and bloody
From the bullet in his jaw,
At his hands worn and muddy
From years burying the Law.
The Reign of Terror
Will fade into lore,
With the King of Errors’
Head on the floor.
Uneasy lies the head
That wears the crown.
They called him "Incorruptible,"
The Prince of Anarchy,
But all men grow tyrannical
At the reins of liberty.
The guillotine is power,
Its steel a despot's rage;
Blood rains down in showers
When democracy's a cage.
The Reign of Terror
Will fade into lore,
With the King of Errors’
Head on the floor.
Uneasy lies the head
That wears the crown.
He tries to speak his final words
But his mouth drips off its hinge.
The flesh, ravaged by the birds,
Makes even soldiers cringe.
On a plank his body's laid,
The wood dampened by his fear;
The lever's pulled, a falling blade,
And all the people cheered.
~~~
Salt of the Earth
The teeth of lions sown by the wind,
Spurned by the salt of the
Earth’s fallow and barren skin,
Find fertile ground in me.
Rains of red poppies
Burst from the blue.
Fireflies and harpies
Beat their wings anew.
The wine from man’s fountains
Imparts courage to implore:
“Gods, step down from your mountains.
Fish, rise up from the shore.”
For kings are few and we are legion,
Flood the borders between all regions.
No blood spills blue torn from its vein.
All dissolves into the grain.
Incite the erosion of sleeping giants
So their slumber may forever last:
Their lies a fading remembrance of science
Past.
Rise, rise, rise…kill.
Seeds of revolution
Sprout forests of stone.
The bricks of toppled castles
Build me my palace,
Mortared with sweat from your brow.
The crops reaped by my vassals
Feed only my malice.
My hearth burns with golden boughs.
Sea, land and air all fall to my glory.
May the earth bear my legacy.
But Time knows no human deeds,
As Nature knows no caste.
The winds sow forests of weeds
On graves of tyrants past.
~~~
Blood on the Cornfields
August in Virginia,
A warm brandy night in 1831,
Hidden in woodlands,
Seven slaves discussed the freedoms to be won.
Christ’s blood on the cornfields,
A benighted hand to suffocate the sun,
War with the Serpent:
Visions from The Book led a preacher to the gun.
"Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven
And all things shall be added unto you,"
Words from the Spirit
To see Southampton County’s insurrection through.
Hoisting the window
The rebels burst into the sleeping master’s room.
Blows from their hatchets:
Each child’s bed a crimson, wooden tomb.
“Was Christ not crucified?”
In deadly silence the farms were sacked,
Alerting no free man to the next attack.
Sixty fell to their axes and their swords,
The General foretelling salvation from the Lord.
Recruiting warriors they freed
From the ranks of the flogged,
They rode through the bogs:
A cavalry of stolen steeds.
The wrath of the unbound,
The oppressors’ constant fear,
The screams of two hundred years,
Piqued the ears of the white man’s hounds.
Lynch mobs’ slaughters
Of black sons and daughters,
Blameless in this battle
Butchered as cattle.
The Deep South trembled at the Negro prophet’s renown
Vengeful militias hunted the panicked slaves down.
Captured near his cavern,
Judged in Jerusalem,
Turner, brimming with glory,
Confessed to his story.
Led to the gallows of Calvary
A killer, a martyr, grinned.
His deeds etched in history
His body hanged and skinned.
~~~
Hanging Gardens
In the gardens perched on the sky,
The ones where snakes sing lullabies,
I met a man who spoke to me,
A dead man hanging from a tree.
He craned his neck and whispered this:
"Perfection is the great abyss.
Leave now lest you share my fate,
A ghost dangling at heaven's gate."
Why should I fear paradise?
I lived free of mortal vice.
So I trudged on past the sycamores
And stood before the pearly doors.
Through the bars I saw the fields:
The stars mere cogs in ox cart wheels,
The earth a pebble in a stream,
But not one human to be seen.
Undeterred, I gripped the latch.
I pulled, but it came unattached.
Despite my rage, the gates stood firm,
Then grew so hot I smelled flesh burn.
I ran back injured to the groves,
And washed my wounds in waterfalls.
As I bathed I heard the groans,
Of voices wrapped in funeral pall.
Count leaves dangling from a branch,
Thus numbered bodies overhead:
Specters moaning for another chance
To escape the orchard of the dead.
An empty noose caressed my neck
The way my first love had.
A soothing feeling on my neck
To forget the good and bad.
To forget the ones who hurt you,
To forget the ones you hurt,
To forget the hate all men accrue
When their feet still touch the dirt.
~~~
The Crossing
I defied the Sonoran wilds,
A wooden border fence to cross.
I’ll feed my wife and child
With the calloused hands my homeland lost.
The last desert wolf has died,
But I will struggle on
To the North.
A battered dog claws the dust
And cowers to the brush as I pass.
On to the American dream.
~~~
Hole in the Sea
Last night, I watched the moon drink the tides
'Til a whale rose from the hole in the sea.
She breathed in the clouds like an opium ride,
Smiled, and devoured me.
My flesh had melted when my mind awoke
To feel her tail tear open the sky.
Fins punctured cities, bled sulfur and smoke;
I wept as the last scream died.
She spat my soul onto a planet of dust.
My thoughts dissolved into the grain.
Whale became woman, the sun gazed with lust;
He took her, and fathered the rain.
From this coupling my shell grew green.
Rainforests sprung from my skin and soil.
Mountains spawned cells, apes & All-In-Between,
And I understood.
I am this mortal coil.
I am this mortal coil.
~~~
The Emigrant’s Wake
Mists once dressed these dunes
Like silk upon her skin,
But the ocean's bare today
And the tide is coming in.
I watch a castle on the beach,
A tower crumbling away,
Mother Nature always wins
The games we children play.
Rocks peek out from the foam;
There seven seagulls stand.
I slip the sandals off my feet
And drop them on the sand.
As I walk dust clings and falls
To my dry and weary soles;
The prints I leave upon the ground
Like words upon a scroll.
Walk into the waves
As the footprints fade away
(Fade away)
Oceans leave no graves
All our legacies decay
(Decay)
The water's cold at dusk,
I thought as I stepped into the tide.
The sea does not want me here.
What could she have to hide?
Our forebears looked to the horizon
And claimed demons lived beyond,
But I called into the distance
And no deities would respond.
Walk into the waves
As the footprints fade away
(Fade away)
Oceans leave no graves
All our legacies decay
(Decay)
Perhaps if I tread further,
Past where my feet engraved
My last mark upon the world,
I'd find a face within the waves.
~~~
Sky Burial
Fade into stars
As god machines.
With our arms
We will shape the world.
With this breath
We become the world.
In parts I lie, staring at the clouds,
And listening to the vultures sing.
The husk beneath this shroud
Brings alms to fallow wings.
Vines spring from my blood,
Wheat grows of my flesh and bone.
The birds descend from above
To lift my body from the stone.
A fair trade, my clay for a soul,
So a pigeon thrives while I have passed.
The mountain justly claims its toll
To break the raptors’ fast.
Their shrieks soothe as siren calls,
Their talons dancer’s hands:
Why angels don demon shawls,
Is not for us to understand.
I glide in feathers’ embrace,
Their beaks beckoning the frost,
To fly past the fog, to rise into grace
And join the loved ones we had lost.
The falcons roost upon the wind.
I meditate until the morn,
Absorbing times I’ve loved and sinned.
At light I wake, a being reborn.