1. |
Serpents of the Sea
04:14
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When winter lumbers to the shore
Summer launches through the foggy gloom.
Her ship with its pin-striped sails teeming with breath
Careens south through the ruins of ice and cool death.
As Summer skips along the waves,
Passing through both mist and snow
And the ice, with its highest crag dwarfing the mast
And its base reaching toward a depth the sun may never glimpse
Winter hovers on the skyline,
Lingering, shadowing.
Summer sanctifies the serpents
Of the sea, of the soil.
Summer spots me on a shore,
Amid an Eden never seen by man.
But my mind is the winter she left far behind her wake
A bare glacial desert, that’s the nothing within.
She shines her rays upon my frost,
Revealing life back to my mind,
And the waves crash through my ears to remind me I’m small,
A fragment of everything and the nothing we share.
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2. |
Incomplete
03:23
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I was gold, pulsing;
Lifted by Mammon--
Once clothed in the warm earth--
Now spread like ashes on the wind.
I was fire, moving
Trees to bend at my command.
Endless rains changed me,
Bent my heat to smog the land.
I’m incomplete, I’m blasted bare,
As unsure as a voiceless prayer.
Set to the wind, this despot swell,
I can’t escape the primal yell.
If I close my eyes will I disappear,
The earth sink into the shade?
I can’t reconnect, I can’t reignite,
I’ve no spark to rebuild a flame.
I was fire, moving
Trees to bend at my command.
Endless rains changed me,
Bent my heat to smog the land.
I’m incomplete, I’m blasted bare,
As unsure as a voiceless prayer.
Set to the wind, this despot swell,
I can’t escape the primal yell.
If I close my eyes will I disappear,
The earth sink into the shade?
I can’t reconnect, I can’t reignite,
I’ve no spark to rebuild a flame.
Four corners call me:
“Disperse across the earth.”
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3. |
Disinfectant
04:21
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Something’s flowering inside me:
The pale darkness of a cloak of death.
On thorny vines it tendrils outward,
Desperate to devour its first breath.
There’s risk in unveiling
What lives in the shade,
But the horrors start to wither
In the light.
Don’t let the sun touch its fiber,
For we might witness all the stains its hoarding.
It might contaminate the children
And disrupt all the gains we’re forging.
There’s risk in unveiling
What lives in the shade,
But the horrors start to wither
In the light.
There are those who refuse to
Let the monstrous words be aired
And so drive them underground
To decay.
Now the demons have their rituals:
Their witchcraft multiplies their scope and size.
In the depths of perdition,
They brace their mantles with the sulphur of spite.
There’s risk in unveiling
What lives in the shade
Horrors start to wither
There are those who refuse to
Let words be aired
And drive them underground
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4. |
Do Androids Dream?
03:13
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I can’t tell who’s looking back in the water;
Something like me, but not quite so, I am sure.
Won’t it please turn around?
Won’t it please make a sound?
Like clockwork, that deep stare
Has made me doubt.
Am I lacking empathy like all the others?
Is it compassion or self-interest that forms my colors?
This reflection hides the facts;
What lies deeper than the mask
A reflective soul
Or an instinctive thing that acts?
Am I connected properly to the world?
Do I fit a useful type from the mold?
Do I lift the fallen up?
Am I made up of such stuff
Like the basest forms
Or something from above?
Where do we go when we’re all shut down?
Where do we go when the dark descends:
Do we restart or does life truly end?
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5. |
The Blackest Plague
03:32
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As I walk up to the house,
You appear behind the gate
Of my mind: A figment of desire--
To have you by me, and have you find me, flashes through my mind again.
As the door shuts, I follow the
Sweet aroma flowing through
From my dreams, For none of this is real:
You are gone, and took my sense, and left me only visions.
The arid plains of memory bring forth
A pathogen from its cracked and fallen fruits.
Yet no death ripens forth, only death-within-life,
And there’s no pleasures to be had.
As I return up the stairs,
A darkness greets me at the gate:
“Enter, and all shall be forgotten,”
Says a dim reflection of my own lips.
Then silence.
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6. |
Psyche and Saturn
03:37
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Thoughtlessly dreaming in the forest,
Deep in a clearing, Psyche holds
Not cupid, but Saturn--she embraces,
Not love, but violent order.
All of my speech, all of my words
Fixate on virtue.
Oh how my mind, in all of my dreams
Returns to bloodshed.
I built an altar in the tree bark,
Scratched perfect rhymes there;
Psyche built her own shrine in the crater of
Amygdala bedrock.
All of my speech, all of my words
Fixate on virtue.
Oh how my mind, in all of my dreams
Returns to bloodshed.
Let me devour the rival who threatens this holy ground.
Disjoin Psyche from Saturn.
Rejoin Psyche to Saturn.
My own eyes inspired, I, the choir,
The oracle of wisdom,
Assemble this bright throne for restoring
Saturn to the highest.
All of my speech, all of my words
Fixate on virtue.
Oh how my mind, in all of my dreams
Returns to bloodshed.
Let me devour the rival who threatens this holy ground.
Let me devour anyone who threatens pure Psyche.
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7. |
Logos
04:36
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When I find I’m growing dim;
When my soul is damp Autumn;
When I scour your sharp corpus:
Dark clouds rise and dull my touch.
I am haunted by your bright power.
And your talents weigh on every hour.
See the words as they come to sight.
Hear the sound as it comes to life.
Feel the air of its author’s soul.
Feel the air through a growing hole
Sometimes I crawl back into the word
Like a hole I’ve dug to hide from the world.
There’s a dawn approaching quick from the east
To melt me away.
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8. |
The Flood Calms
04:09
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The stream out back has been growing from its chains.
The rain set loose all the power once restrained.
The ground has joined in a heavy, molten sludge.
My view was the carnage on display;
So long was that all my eyes could see.
Once held in a body chrysalized,
Soon I shall kiss my deepest dark goodbye.
I could feel the clouds part in the sky.
I could count the stars again at night.
I could smell the rain caught in the breeze.
I could sense the flood calm in my heart.
A tree fell into the flowing, moving tomb;
Carried off towards an uncertain doom;
Shattering into the debris in its path.
My view was the carnage on display;
So long was that all my eyes could see.
Once held in a body chrysalized,
Soon I shall kiss my deepest dark goodbye.
I could feel the clouds part in the sky.
I could count the stars again at night.
I could smell the rain caught in the breeze.
I could sense the flood calm in my heart.
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9. |
Parallax
05:01
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I grasp a rim that isn’t there:
My glasses have been misplaced somewhere.
Yet my neck strains from the weight of the frame:
My mind feels discordant pain.
This sight is terrible:
Between the upper rim and my unmediated sight widens a chasm.
Three fingers scratch at palpable hair,
Confused that my full sight’s not there.
Once they’re on I’ve two angles to see:
Two perspectives of reality.
This sight is terrible:
Between the upper rim and my unmediated sight widens a chasm.
A parallax directs my sight, yet I cannot perceive the tangible.
A parallax trains my sight, and I am seeing through everything.
The catacombs of my mind remain undisturbed and tightly sealed.
A parallax drains my sense, and I cannot see anything.
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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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