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SILENCE-complete lyrics

I. free gods
II. void
III. perdition
IV. enmity
V. seer
VI. atrophy aria
i. insensate
ii. the tragedy
iii. the perversion
VII. snowfall
VIII. a madman's solace
IX. season of suicide
X. silence
XI. a forgotten name
XII. precambrian
XIII. the rise

I. Free Gods

[whispering voices]
When night falls, I lie awake, hands folded in reverence—
In fear. In fear of a phantasm
Manifesting Himself in the dark corners of my mind,
Like a great outgrowth of a childhood nightmare.
And then, a thought.
Lustful? Sinful?
I am beside myself with shame,
Beneath the prying eyes of a phantasm
Who sees and knows all.
Guilty, cowering, terrified that my own thoughts
Are not wholly mine.
Terrified that I can never truly be…alone.

I hear voices speaking to me
In words dredged from arcane and bygone days.
Speaking of visions, of forms, of gods.
Speaking convincingly still, it seems,
As new demagogues rise to lead new passive flocks
Toward the glorious profundity of silence—
Toward belief, belief in a thing greater than all the combined splendor
Of men, the earth, and all the majesty of the universe,
All suddenly trivialized before another Being more powerful still.
Belief in a path determined by His law,
A navigable path to truth—
Reducing life to pale shades of dogmatism…
A belief that life really does have inherent meaning
That the individual is really endowed with purpose
Consoled, for we are never truly…alone.

All are left longing in a wistful silence
It’s as certain as suffering
Staring, hollow-eyed, from beyond locked fences
Freezing in the foreboding streets
When salvation descends from the violent skies
Lie down and close your eyes
To dream of the hallowed terror
Where virtue exists in the despised

Lead me away
To a place where I can hide
No god is free
It seems I must open my eyes

Stricken with fear at the approaching silence
Resisting the impending slumber
Bewildered by questions and stained with doubt
Fear and frustration, a wish for death
With lightning scorching the angry skies
Drowning in a damp grand design
Reveries float upon the misty air
Unfolding in the feeble of mind

Feeble
Forced to choose
Fervent
Feet on fire
Beneath the shroud
A tallow mask
A will
A mind
Misguided guide
Helpless
Stricken with sorrow
Suffering
Burning to believe
Lies!
Built upon a disease
No god is free

I am bewildered by things that should be so simple—
If I contemplate sin, know it as sin, and sin nonetheless
Can I ever truly be sorry?
I am made to feel vile, disgusting
Merely in desiring
In pride or ambition, in thoughts of vengeance
Toward those who have wronged me.
I lie here, longer still…
Perhaps I am truly…alone.

These passive flocks mobilize over time
Teachings of peace
Spread violent death and butchery
Beyond vexations of nightmares.
In the name of a phantasm
Merely another declaration of war
Against the human race and against the world
Injustice will come
It is as certain as anything can be
And for all their grandiose pomposity
I will not live to grovel
I would rather die, head held high…alone

The seeker grapples with the wondrous silence
The martyrs are still spilling blood
The righteous still censor the offending shadows
Yet the truth inspires the worst of fears
Beware a repressed darker side
Obscenities of the unconscious mind
Groping blindly, self-destructive
Mystery unveiled in opened eyes

To see, but once
To believe in a painless state
Without lies or shame
Without mistakes
When man invents God
Or God invents man
Staring back at me
A mirror, a sea
No god is free…

II. Void

My eyes focus upon the light
Of distant stars and nebulae
Drifting within this vast expanse
A timelessness, an escape

In wonderment I seek, I dare
To reach the light toward which I stare
As moments pass I seek to drown
Within the emptiness that surrounds

A wanderer
A shadow in a sea of light
In the blackness
In the void
From here
One can see everything
Light my way
Into the void

I am surrounded by nothingness
Incorruptible, unreachable
Dilated eyes that peer
From within the boundless blackness
Endlessly, eternally

The mind, a guide, an altered state
Eliminate the illusory
Step back behind the eyes
(Beyond the lies)
Another reality

In wonderment I seek , I dare
To reach the light toward which I stare
As eons pass I fear to drown
Within the emptiness that surrounds

I am frozen
Within this timeless void
Sensation denied
Far beyond impassioned fire
A storm, a lifelessness
Lingering agony grows
Going insane
In this crystalline sphere
Of nothingness

Often I fear to stay
Within this ever-expanding grave
Encompassing me
In this blackness
In this void

I am surrounded by nothingness
Beyond all, unreachable
The poignant splendor I see
Is beckoning me
Entwined in mysteries
Depth, death, or destiny?
Floating amid the blackness
Floating in the void

III. Perdition

Perdition…

Awaken with a start
Rub sleep from tired eyes
The haze begins to clear
Revealing a cesspool of lies
Conventions built on fear
Justice reduced to prestige
Passions betray ignorance
Beset by tyranny

A system
Inevitably sadistic
Tracking human history
Perpetuating misery
A violent voice
Vacuous yet vicious
Bleed for mediocrity
Perdition and enmity

Oppressive silence reigns
Breaking with the dawn
Flee toward the light
Cower before the Storm
Words are but a taste
Listen and succumb
Desecrating truth
Blissfully numb

IV. Enmity

[ instrumental ]

V. Seer

Awash in a sea of contemplation
The mood darkens with the setting sun
Revealing guiding stars – the traitors
Constantly shifting and changing form

Outwardly there lies a vast expanse
Full ofmuted movements and silent desperation
A dusty shroud covering unfulfilled hearts
Eyes that hide the tears of unknown destinations

Interwoven into this tapestry
Yet the thread is bare
Incomplete

See me not for myself
For I am not as I appear
I am not
I am

See nothing for itself
For nothing is
As it appears

VI. Atrophy Aria

i. insensate

Viewing from outside
At last I can see
Compounding my disgust
For humanity

Feeling begins to dissolve
At last I am free
Acutely I sense life
Awaiting tragedy

ii. the tragedy

[ instrumental ]

iii. the perversion

Reflecting upon a past time
When guiding stars could be seen
Before the artifice of the fallen
Gave rise to perversity

Observing a sea of the silent
Malice seething in me
Herded, scattered, trampling
Poisoned by perversity

Looking ahead to the future
When all have surrendered their gleam
When no one is left to wonder
Victims of perversity

Viewing from outside
At last I can see
Compounding my disgust
For humanity

VII. Snowfall

All sensation has been paralyzed
Love and hate, bliss and violence
Buried beneath the stillness of frozen ground

Snow falls below
Numbed by the biting cold of suffering
Snow falls above
Entombed in crystalline agony

Immobile, insensate
Inscrutable, unreachable
To fall, mourning, to fall
With the snow

How I long to rise
With the frozen gray clouds
Into the black and frigid skies
Or sink into oblivion
To rot away
To forever sleep…

Immobile, insensate
Inscrutable, unreachable
To fall, bleeding, in a final act of cowardice
With the snow

VIII. A Forgotten Name

Whisper the name
Cast off into oblivion
Forgotten and despairing
Beneath the waves

A watcher from beyond
A shadow dancing in the flames
A fading reminder
A forgotten name

And it ends
In a slumber of eternity
In the vastness of space and time
Blanketed in sleep
From behind the eyes
Let go the soul into the depths
Of infinity

Whisper the name
Cast off into oblivion
Forgotten and despairing
Beneath the heavy sands of time

And it’s over
Take a place beyond the reach
Of tomorrow
And all that it brings

From behind the eyes
Released into another plane
Of infinity…

XII. Precambrian

[ instrumental ]

XIII. The Rise

Voices pierce the placid night
"Precarious is this precipice"
Soiled with remains
A swamp of endless time
When even the seer
Is at once struck blind

Follow into the madness
Or lead the willing astray
Into an eternal future
Shining like dawn
Through walls of pain

To witness the rise
Harkening beyond
Ruins, decay
Time, a tide
Remove the dust of dying worlds
On the corpses of kings and fools
Arise, another world

Reason breaks through the arcane
Bringing the downfall of aimlessness
For what once enslaved
Can, too, liberate
When even the living
Are never quite awake

And all the beautiful misery,
All the tragic bliss
Of a limitless universe teeming with life
Will go on,
Beyond humanity,
Beyond this planet which we call home.
For all our rashness
And propensity to destroy—
Paradoxically in the name
Of sublimating the chaos and pain
Of the living world.
We give rise to our own chaos
The tumult resulting from a tragic folly
That is uniquely ours,
A bizarre collective neurosis
Embedded in rationale
Which seeks to overcome, defeat, and stifle itself,
A poverty of inner experience,
An insanity, besetting our great minds
Forever in turmoil, forever in motion
Forever seeking the great silence
Urgently striving to quiet the din of cognizance
For it is not important how one lives
But that one lives
It is within no other’s power
To grant one with proper motivation
And purpose
In a moment
A blink of a great cosmic eye
Seeing all from afar
Living and dying
Briefly enjoying fragments of time
Stretching to infinity
Collapsing in upon themselves
Amid successes and failures
All of which are but temporary vestiges
Of an existence rife with pain
And with strife
And yet also spreading forth
Flowering into fulfillment
With joy, with bliss
With all the most logical of madness
And the most flawed perfection
Of existence

RUINS-complete lyrics

i. desolation
ii. calling
iii. monolith
iv. the energy of pain
v. ruins
vi. at the vanguard
vii. incinerate
ix. the storm

I. Desolation

[ instrumental ]

II. Calling

Growing on unknown ground
Branches intertwine
To drink of the same water
And reach outward toward the sky

Points of space and time now shifting
Giving birth as to obscure the day
The stirrings diminish beneath us
Trampled in the name

And the shadowy rooting beneath
Helplessly entangled identities

No more lives lie free and in motion
All that lives mired in shallow seas

A single thought can define
The great collective mind
Watching intently, falling apart
Summoned to infinity

The shadow created the storm
To lash at the tranquil sea
The overcast skies go ignored
As the water flowing beneath the soil

Endarkenment seeks higher grounds
And gives way to primal reason
Seeking an outlet void of thought
And rise to the chaos within

The order of all things, disordered
The pattern of thought, defiant
So as all things overlap
The new word spreads rampantly

Obscenity of consciousness
Creates paradoxes of fear
And leaves only false sovereignty
Secure walls of ambient dreams

The calling is a wary farewell
To the path of the smiling naïve
Watching intently, standing apart
Reaching toward infinity

III. Monolith

A steeple touching the sky
In honor of humility
Faith confined within stone walls
Contriving light
Seeks to control
Rigid, unchanging through time
Reflecting through millennia
In stasis
Glaring down at shadows
Deemed obscene by the righteous

But a day will come
When structures born dying
Will crumble into ruin
Will fall to dust and blow away
On the winds of the eternal storm…

IV. The Energy Of Pain

Tear-wetted lashes
Can see the sun through the scars
The chasm dilates
The scream collapses the walls

Refuse on a dusty path
Trampled and without course
Will someone redirect an eye
And full of guilt, move on?

A masochrist
And omniscient gagging sounds
Bring pain to sanctity
And silence to reason

The squandered energy of pain
Could redirect the sun
A somber tradition and guilty parties
Bow down with frozen hearts

Release
The valve reverses direction
Cleansing fluids rushing inward
To be inverted and crushed
Among the empty and profane
All light sent out
Acted upon singularly
Contorted and decayed
Never to escape

And then the answer
Which lies among the ruins
Unfathomable
Unreachable
Yet radiating with a brilliance
Unknown
Too bright to betray
The soul is a tree
When laden with suffering
Death and stagnation will come
A release from the disease
And self-forged chains
Of contorted realities

The squandered energy of pain
Could redirect the sun
To turn its face to shine
Upon liberation
Into the abyss…

V. Ruins

[ instrumental ]

VI. At the Vanguard

Struggle to reach higher
Into blinding light
But thus decay reaches
Regardless of height
Chaotic fragments
Coalesce and multiply
Like the shell of the nautilus
An image of time
In still black reminders
And pictures now dead
Linger thoughts within thoughts
To great Death hand-in-hand
To lie in the fields
That rise to the sky
To wither away
And to dream away life

Held in mind and hand
So much left undone
Secrets kept and broken
And cluttered memoirs
So as the darkness overcomes
And burns its victims in their fires
intuitively understood
An end note left to inspire

VII. Incinerate

I feel a closure approaching
Beneath the ground all remain silent
Entangled, I grapple with reason
Fearing the will of this violence
Life is a whimsical sadist
Even in burial I fear there will be no rest
Rest…

Ashes of ancestors sting my flesh
As dust of successors is born among the stars
The face of eternity in a breath
I die and, burning, I wander on

My blood no longer flows
A frozen testament to humanity
Lying still upon the pyre
The flames are engulfing my form
Dust fills the eyes of onlookers
Vulnerable in their grievous façade
Inevitable incineration
Final living defeat

Yellow star, and Your warmth
You too will burn away into nothingness
Yellow star, and Your light
Shine into oblivion
One day I will be dust and ash
My human essence forgotten
Incinerate…

VIII. Requiem

[ instrumental ]

IX. The Storm

Dirty and soaked, they watch the eternal storm
Fill the seas outside the walls
Seated and smiling in this game of demise
Waiting for the tidal wave to fall
It will fall…

Scared and stupid, they crowd in for support
Looking for companion minds
With a flash of lightning and a rumbling overhead
The wall of water blacks out the skies
Blacks out the skies…

No wall is high enough to keep out the sea
No body strong enough to defy the end
Those who remain are but pieces in a violent game
As fits of chaos descend

The impact washes away the hordes
Dragged into an endless oblivion
The fearful run away, and are crushed by the wave
The strong are pressed against the walls
Against the wall…

No wall built to protect
Is high enough that it cannot fall
The water crashes down harder
Inevitably destroying all
Those who survive each wave
Should not be considered blessed
For the storm soon sends one twice its size
It can end only in death
Only in death

More to come...

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