CORMORANT LYRICS

1. The First Man

Dream into being.

Ancestors eternal,
two giants faternal,
wielding stone knives.
Upon shapeless bodies,
the All-Father's follies,
they carve human lives.

Sun Mother!
Wake unborn seeds
to grow,
snakes to bleed
mighty rivers
that quiver and
flow.

The light on the oils,
a spectrum of coils:
Rainbow Serpent.
The storm clouds empowered,
crying orhpans devoured,
drowned in its currents.

Eaglehawk,
your children slain
by Crow,
split your pain!
Through the brush you stalk,
draped in quills of flame.

Raven dyed in smoke,
entombed birds reborn,
locked in everlasting strife.

Mourn the songs
of times past.

Prisons
engorged with
risen
"savages,"
the first
to forge myths.
Still, thrist
ravages
all.

Proud First People
beneath the steeple
of a white ogd.
Whole trives accused,
children abused.
No spared rod.

Terra
nullius,
bearer
of disease.
Slowly
breathe in this
lowly
gasoline
death.

Culture borken,
half-castles stolen,
a mother's shout.
The flaying of skin,
eugenic sin,
black bred out.

A swallowing torrent
once swept the abhorrent
beneath the foam.
May spirits of rain
rise up once again, to
shape the land we roam.

Uluru,
battle of snakes,
the earth
roused awake
to tremble anew,
a howling mountainous birth.
Demons spawned of mud
sculpt generations in their blood.

2. Funambulist

None speak of the pious in history:
Notre Dame conquered by a poète mauldit.
Beyond France's gendarmes and butchery
rose my twin-eyed concrete Babel staring
down the gods.
Stir their hearts;
men applaud
crime as art.

Violent birth.
Pile driver lances
pierce the earth
and bleed the clouds.
(Walk on its veins)

Steel and glass.
The propance dancers
wrap this mass
in burning shrouds.
(Forest of cranes.)

New York, I adopt this child.

Flight over the ocean,
mind as vine to stone
on a tower.
Sleight of foot in motion,
twined aroud a throne.
I count and count the hours.

Alea jacta est.

Wire.
A workman's attire.
The years we conspired
finally bear fruit
this August
mo(u)rn
a nation forlornm
its emperor shorn
of august suit
by modest blades.

As I walk he fades.

Crate:
500 pound weight.
Whisked up the freight
to south level
one zero
fo(u)r
the nightwatchman's snore,
my skull on the floor,
sold ot the devil
for heroes'
deeds.

To the skies I lead.
Bowman draws the string.
Ropes and cable...
...cling stowaway to the arrow's flight;
at missle's point, north and south unite.
Cordina, clamp, cavaletti, knot...
At backbreaking dawn, the wires pull taut.

Rope still sways.
Winds will rage.
Heart ablaze,
I wage
war
on fate.
Fear devoid,
lungs inflate,
tempt the void:

The first step.

Le néant.
Vos chants, vos cris, je les entends.
A chaque pas, le nuages s'adoucissent.
Je danse. Elégance.
Je me permets un sourir:
Si je meurs, quelle mort!
Avec les dieux à mes pieds.

I wave, I sit, I rest, I dream.

Speak to birds
words of calm.
Psalms of faith
swathe no auspice
wreaked by siren howls.

Uproar from the lowland:
the rattle of lawmen's chains.
The lords of the northland
cast me to the plains
a mortal man.
The last step.

Nona, spin your thread.
Join it to the Sun,
so I may walk.
Morta, rouse your dead.
Tell them of the sun,
for with me they walk.

3. Confusion Of Tongues

[Instrumental]

4. Junta

What horrors we wage
in the light of day,
bodies left decaying
for the world to see.

Conakry,
September, two thousand nine.
Moïse Dadis,
junta chief, will not resign
his command
to sworn democratic law.
Thousands band
to demand that he withdraw.

Crowd trapped.
Soldiers
gather,
guns drawn.
Fire.

Butchery veiled in tear gas,
bayonettes puncture eyes.
Flesh strewn across the grass,
knives sever robes from thighs.
Women raped with gun barrels,
bullet through a child’s head,
howls of humans feral
as they haul away the dead.

Red berets,
elite guard,
murder-crazed,
a city scarred.
Stores they loot,
ribs they snap
under boot.
Cadavers wrapped.

“C’est du
jamais-vu,”
they said.
“Pourquoi
nous, Allah?”
they pled
to absent god.

At the morgue a mother
seeks out her son.
No remains were found.
A desperate father
reaches for his gun,
his daughter bound
in an army base,
used by soldiers in turn,
‘til a rapist discerned
her familiar face,
and, shamed, set her
free.

She speaks no word to her doctor,
for fear her pain disgrace her kin.
For weeks she dared not sleep or dream.

Camara denied blame for the atrocity:
“The military’s beyond my control.”
The chief of his guard drew a pistol
and fired a round in the president’s
skull.

He survives,
abdicates.
A flood of
candidates
compete in Guinea’s
first truly
democratic vote.

Anarchy
mars the year.
Election
frauds unclear.
Will of the people:
Guineans elect
Alpha Condé.

The girl’s suicide,
the son never found,
the butchers alive.
The butchers alive.

5. The Purest Land

I’ve slit the throats
of clergymen and governors.
Those bloated swine...
May their screams unhinge
a thankless crown.

O King! See your soldiers
scrape at the algae growing
below the planks?
They starve, yet still
they quarrel for phantom ore
once owed your throne.

“Forgive this ship of fools,”
said I to the mouths of trees,
leaves as hellhound tongues
outstretched to drink the stream.

The beast flung its filth
into the wake,
tail coiled,
fingers grasping
the remains of our splintered mast.
Once we’ve razed the land of gold
I will crucify him.

The corpses on my raft
smell of piss and blood,
yet they were but men,
and all men, slaves and kings alike,
leave stench as their epitaph.
Not I.

Holy Mother Church of Rome,
cleanse this ground I conquer!
Rain brimstone upon the judges
who steal from the weary.
Slaughter the Lutherans
and priests who taint your word.
Make Peru the purest land,
for I am its prince
and will forever be.
I am its prince
and will forever be.

O King! See your isle
burned by my soldiers.
Your vassals and their wives,
I hung them all.

Panama will fall.
With my daughter
I forge an empire
to survive us both.

My deeds live on,
for I have seen what men
could only dream they saw.
I have seen what men
could only dream they saw.

6. A Howling Dust

The soil here is hard in summer
so I buried my father in a tomb of rocks,
a plot behind St. Catherine's church
to lay rest the giilded dream of pitiable men.

With gold found to the North
Quartzburg drove out its whores,
its foreigners and roughnecks.
They settled this camp.

The Mexicans often staged
bull and bear fights near the bar.
They kept a boy entertained
when there were no hangings to enjoy.

The Cantonese flooded the quarries,
working for less than the Whites.
My father would curse the Orientals,
yet came home reeking of opium.

A group of my friends and I
left to explore the creek.
The Chinaman kneeled there,
gleaning for gold.
We mocked him and pushed him,
I prodded him with my knife.
He gripped his revolver
and fired in the air.

The errant bullet
ricocheted off a stone
and grazed my leg.
I ran back bawling
to the town.

Mobs
surround
the crying Chinaman,
Father clutching the noose.

Law
arrived.
The sheriff demanded
that he be jailed and properly tried.

Gangs amassed
late at night
outside the jail.
Father led,
rope in hand,
prey in his cell.
Smooting lies.
Tempted with
tobacco leaves,
the Chinese
reached his arm
through the bars.

The lynch mob swiftly grabbed
the gleaner's exposed hand.
Father wrapped the collar
aroud his neck.
The horde yanked on the rope.
Chinaman dragged and choked,
his brains dashed upon the wall.

Soon all the gold mines dried
but that blood never did.
Red still stains the jail cell wall.
Father was never tried,
none mourn a foreigner,
but I saw guilt in his eyes.
With all the riches spent,
the people left the town
yet I stayed to dwell here still.
When Father died of drink
I did not weep for him.
I pray the grave unburdens his sins.

I pray that someone will remain
to bury me.
I pray that someone will remain.

7. Unearthly Dreamings

Meadows of the Motherland,
your farmer's ashes sown
by fallen stars,
bear mankind another strand
of unearthly dreamings grown
from earthly scars.

"Killers all!" he cried,
flames clawing at his throat
through melted fore.
Hands jut from stygian tide
upon the ferryman's boat,
dashed on the shore.

Shrieks of the atmosphere
deafened the engineer,
vessel now commandeered.
by twisted chute.
Thoughts to his warnings spurned,
promised a safe return,
Brezhnev's plan unconcerned
by wild fears
voiced by a mute.

Call
to grieving wife,
family left below.
Governemt strife:
father in
thrall.
His daughter's grin
while plaing in the snow.

Solar panels
undeployed.
Radio channels,
lost in void.
Foretold to fail,
rode on a stallion pale.

Orbit 19.,
ordered home.
Blue and the green,
roads to Rome.
Oreintation
from the sun,
ion propulsion
manually run.

Halt
the second launch,
thunder from the squall.
Future blood staunched,
rain's blessed
fault:
three crewmen spared
ther companion's fall.

The calm of space.

Aurora Borealis,
fire of spirits passed,
to cleanse of human malice
man's rise into the vast.

Burn, burn the ties that bind
mortals to the terrence rind.
Yearn, yearn to part the skies,
upon an ark of sullen eyes.

He cursed the dust
that bore him
[screaming]
bastard child abandoned to the clouds.

"Compost for the Kremlin Wall.,
fed to blooms on Lenin's grave...
Marvel as we heroes crawl
to our deaths so bravel!"
said Yuri to solemn friend.
"Soyuz will be a martur's end."
"You cannot die in my stead,"
he replied. "You bring the Moon."
He turned, hiding tears he'd shed,
and walked to his tomb.
Gagarin unsheathed his cross,
and prayed to sway a brother's loss.

This too shall pass.

In bygone meadows of the Motherland
a laborer boy studies planes gone by.
The unearthly dreamings of a framhand
to pluck the planets from a fertile sky.







CORMORANT LYRICS