1. |
Bridge
02:15
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I have to burn this bridge
To save my soul.
I’ll torch any scraps
That might lead you back.
Gaslight that first roadblock
Where you turned away from me.
The smoke cloaks my tears,
Like you cloaked the truth.
The sun descends upon the trees
And flames the sky above my ruins.
A catechizing string of light
Threads itself through the luster of ash.
The ruptured woof of my world
Sews itself back together
Like the fibers of a scab
Holding in the crucial gore.
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2. |
Done with Peace
03:52
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Done with peace –
It seems we're on to new things.
Done with peace.
It seems weʼve already moved on.
Obtaining all you can
To fill in the missing pieces.
The emptiness of your life
Requires constant accumulation.
Done with peace –
Our realm traffics eyes for eyes.
Done with peace –
Thereʼs nothing there for realists.
The idea of sacrifice
Has never crossed your selfish mind.
To give to those who need
Is your forced cross to bear.
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3. |
Mutilate
03:54
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Follow me into the hills;
Follow me into the sun:
There we’ll find the way--
Towards the violet light.
Trace my tracks upon the highway;
Place your tires within my shade:
You’re closing in on me--
Just a few more miles.
Mutilate your soul by carving
Arteries you’ve passed through legion.
Whirling thoughts bring hell up to your days
On this earth. On this earth. On this earth.
See the form within the clearing?
Placed with haste, and visible?
Bloated, shredded skin--
Torn at by the birds.
Pull over and kill the engine;
Crack the trunk and fetch the shovel:
Dig until you can
See the underworld.
Mutilate your soul by carving
Arteries you’ve passed through legion.
Whirling thoughts bring hell up to your days
On this earth. On this earth. On this earth.
Dig in. Dig in.
I can no longer look on this shambles,
Cooked in the sun of its being. So be it.
Fill in. Fill in.
Cover this corpse up with the dust of earth
Face down, considering Sisyphus. So be it.
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4. |
Vengeance
04:10
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Ghost of peace
Run through the cracks in me,
Burrow within.
Eyes of flame
Roll back inside my skull;
Globes of antiquity,
Dissolve.
The scale of justice slants both ways;
The weights would better crush themselves.
Wraith of calm
Obstruct my phoenix heart,
Obscure this wrath.
Phantom mind,
Teach me the purpose of
What humans have been calling
Just.
The airy scales should remain
The vellum of an ancient fantasy;
The rotting case of a long-forgotten time.
A memory left to die.
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5. |
Acute Dilation
02:41
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Suddenly I’m freezing.
Not my skin, but my soul feels the sting
Rush upon it from the icy, flowing Styx.
My body shrinks to cloak the core--
Matter instinctively blanketing
The immaterial self, as if it could
Lend heat to a black hole
Opening deep within.
In a moment the screams of a life –
The torturous memories;
The sweet seconds lost in their own event horizon –
Peal into the fragile ear,
Down into the surfeited heart,
Reverberating forever, it seems;
Polluting every pore
With a dark, red hue.
Opening deep within--
Polluting every pore
With a dark, red hue.
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6. |
Dead Reckoning
08:47
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When I disappear into the violent squall of love, I know I won’t return.
When I disappear beneath that cloudy surf, I’ll yield.
As I’m drifting here, awaiting the tidal wave of a note on scarlet fog,
The tension swells and shakes this very hull.
There’s a flicker of yellow light
Bouncing through the night on ferrite.
And I figure my course then dissolve for your site.
There’s an echo flooding through the mist,
Feeling at me your precious kiss.
And there’s no obstacle keeping me from you.
I renounce all fealties to man or divine.
I forsake all loyalties to any save you.
There’s an eddy running through my ship,
Sacrilege is answered with a rift.
Now the sea lurches up, rocking foam life to dust.
And a dim cobalt laugh tears the whole ship to chaff.
In the firmament
You look back at me –
A clouded mirror
Of prophecy.
In the firmament
You look back at me –
A haunted mirror
Of fallacy.
Powerless, I lie here waiting
On a torture raft
Made of splintered slabs of heart
Directed the wrong way.
A soft-spoken goddess clamors
Sorely in my ear,
“There is no love worth retrieving;
Not a mortal love.”
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7. |
Doublethink
06:13
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Two coeval paths unfold before me,
Equidistant and authentic to my eyes.
The first leads to you—
My ever longed-for paramour,
For whom my heart leaps up,
The angelic figure of my core,
The complement of my spirit.
The second path leads to you, Death,
My most longed-for companion,
Close bosom-friend of my soul,
Who will someday rescue me
From the heavy burden of consciousness:
Where every thought must be pondered and revolved
Around the gyres of the mind,
Until it’s taken up by the ethical loom
To be woven into the warp and woof of moral fabric.
The process seems unending, perpetual,
Revolving until the palpable disappears.
I choose both paths equally, simultaneously,
Both seem viable and worth surrendering to.
Or is this the dissonance of a diseased mind?
Do I wake or sleep?
Because I dream no longer
And have no point of reference.
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8. |
Hess
09:00
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(The Loneliest Man in the World)
I’m vomiting up the poison.
I’m vomiting up the shame.
I’m retching from the lies.
I’m wretched from the pain.
The propaganda gasses
Flood the chambers of my skull,
Exterminating all
The hauntings of my mind—
The memories within.
The rotten foreign cabal
Colludes to bring us down
For actions other nations
Performed before our own,
Grew fat from the scheme.
No evacuation.
I cannot eat;
I cannot sleep;
I cannot move
To exercise.
I cannot evacuate my bowels.
I cannot remove this waste.
My dross is salted in my guts
As the memories inside my mind.
No evacuation.
The food is poison,
The pills are poison.
Nothing comes in.
Nothing goes out.
No evacuation.
My loneliness returns.
All I can do is voice the hero’s tale.
Like hearing Napoleon’s annals
Directly from the source.
But sips of Lethe saves my sanity
From the blitzkrieg of the gone:
A defense apparatus--
A curtain I could pull down on the past.
Deputy, deputy, deputy.
Lebensraum, lebensraum, lebensraum.
Verdun, Artois, Ypres. Verdun, Artois, Ypres.
All in vain.
Pull down the curtain on the past.
Elba, Saint Helena, Elba, Saint Helena.
France, l'armée, tête d'armée, Joséphine.
Tete d’armee.
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Matte Martin San Francisco, California
Art Rock singer-songwriter and bassist of The Zap Guns.
Matte Martin recommends:
Great cinematic, complex, orchestral music.
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