MISERY INDEX LYRICS

1. Unmarked Graves

[Netherton / Jarvis]

Lost in the annals of time long past over,
Deep in soil, shallow and unkempt,
Brothers and sisters, in ground hallowed sacred,
Their blood, this earth, we will consecrate,
Their eyes once boiling with life,
Their hearts bursting with passion,
With dreams they carried forever,
Through days that promised the world,
Then came the black winds burning,
The beasts with fire in their hands,
The execution squads surrounding,
And their children in pieces at their feet,
...and who stood watching?
From El Mozote to Amritsar,
From Nanking to My Lai,
From Srebrenica to Algiers,
From Wounded Knee to Sabra-Shatila,
From Tiananmen to East Timor,
From Warsaw to Darfur,
From Guernica to Halabja,
Their spirit lives in defiance of it all,
Graves of our fathers vanquished,
Entombed in their furrowed prisons,
Soldiers programmed, show no mercy,
Following their orders from tyrants that hide behind politics
...and the world stood watching,
Regret, nausea and rage,
"Never Again" was the phrase,
Lest not our conscience we betray,
...as we stand passive in our guilt.

2. Conquistadores

[Netherton / Jarvis]

At dawn he rides, the fleet sets sail, the tanks will roll, when Mars screams,
Across the world, our children wake, abandoned offspring, writhing there,
Choked by the hidden hand of God,
The swansong is on his lips, an albatross hangs from his red neck,
The doves are dead, the hawks are free, to propagate the burdens of empire,
What eyes have seen the world,
From well-worn knees,
Where corpses lay at soldier's feet,
Conquistadors - God Speed!
The Prophet and the angel,
Inside his oval lair,
She whispers to his empty head,
"Conquistador... war is peace",
As infidels in Eden's garden... we'll tear out the serpent's eyes,
"A class filth infested, the heathen of the Holy Land -
We'll trample, stomp, and segregate them
Their God is dead-infected, they're rats within our shrines -
Conquistador... why would I lie?
Have another drink of wine,
Toast it to the terrorist,
You're brothers in each other's arms,
Doppelganger's in distress,
The clash of the fools, he arrives,
Blinded and faith-martyred,
Cleansed and reborn,
As the suicide crusader with the passion of Christ armed,
In the shadow of the crescent moon,
The crucifix shines in its petrol graveyard,
In what God's name shall they rule?
...the Cowboy and Caliphate, in love with each other.

3. Outsourcing Jehovah

[Kloeppel / Jarvis]

Their dumped along the coastline on a silent East trade wind,
Then appearing if by magic, in freight-lined bins,
From labor market hell, straight to well-worn shelves,
Would Jesus shop at Wal-Mart if the crosses were on sale?
Things upon blessed things,
In idolatry where death is worshiped,
Cash cured sins, in this fetish of the object holy,
Still you put your love in idols built by mortal man,
Now what did God say in that old testament?
And what about those workers, in exotic China-land?
They have your daddy's job, and you're next on the corporate outsource plan... as serfs born to serve your Lord in command,
"Now our border's the place where the grace of Christ ends,
It does not apply to those heathen abroad,
As long as they slave, I'll have them to thank -
It's more cash in hand to spend at the mall",
Woe to the children of God!
O Suffer thy misguided ways!
...you've sold your human essence to the cold world of dead and empty things...
You're sold.

4. Breathing Pestilence

[Kloeppel / Jarvis]

Looking in from the outside,
Each city pukes its wounded forth,
A world that time forgot,
Along 95 from south to north,
From gray to greener lands,
To exburb, suburb, in-between,
Some choke and some breathe,
A fact of life in this plutocracy,
As the best of the worst plan our lives,
A mass murder of the spirit cuts the vine bearing wisdom's fruit,
Brother, wave your trust in faith goodbye,
When it's man against man, the culture consecrates the code of spite,
So this is the ideal system -
Millions shunned in urban tombs,
Easy for the rich to suffer,
As they smile, wave, and lock their doors,
Driving away from the failures,
So trivial and so normalized,
Back to their pristine pastures,
To forward and secure their perfect lives,
This nation blood-bound with its ties,
Gives not a fuck for its children or the toils of their wasted labor,
Flood pouring gates open wide,
Upon this fiction of a state, and the excess it expels and justifies,
Ghosts in concrete veils, haunt Katrina's winds,
Gasp, as charcoal air, fills lungs as black as tar
And they drown...

5. Meet Reality

[Netherton / Jarvis]

Outside your gated homes,
The world begins where your street ends,
Yet in time, your demons will come crawling back,
Praise God for what you have in life,
For your wealth is as hollow as the heart you hold inside.
A nightmare in three dimensions,
This opulence embraced by man,
Reapers of the peasant's harvest,
Gorging on the fat of the land,
Caged in worldly mansions,
Picking vassals out from the poor,
Worship at the altar of avarice,
Where Bourgeois man is born,
As dead men walking spoiled earth,
Who spend their shining coffers dry,
With thirst never quenched nor quelled,
...You ever think to question "why"?
Outside your window of comfort,
It's like night of the living dead,
For each dime you bleed from another,
The stench of your poverty spreads,
Defining the world in equations,
Commodity prices and fees,
You see other humans as cattle,
To service the gluttonous beast,
A werewolf's banquet,
Of ostentatious parody,
Masquerading fortunes,
Amassed through servility,
As you eat them alive... now meet your slaves,
Gomorrah caving in, on your precious homes,
Four walls falling fast...

6. Sensory Deprivation

[Voyles / Jarvis]

Anachronisms piling high on memories decayed, 300 days have passed again and here I am, nothing's changed,
Burning time, the specters of a past life lived,
Another year, to wallow in the bitterness of loss,
Recast into this languid mold,
Back to a state of Thermidor,
Entranced by the reminiscence haunt,
But what could have been, now is gone,
The detritus of days long past lie shipwrecked 'cross my ocean floor,
Where laughing ghosts echo of halcyon days I knew before,
Demons breeding demons in my head,
Is this how the book of life ends?
Dead drunk, dejected and unsung?
Left with no purpose but to grieve?
And far are the cosmos that twist and unwind,
A left-handed path into the black,
As youth dissolves quickly and tensions divide,
I stand frozen on that day I left,
A circumnavigation course, adrift, lost and compromised,
Navigating mental seas, balkanized, 28, 23, 17, and 33, each era brands its stigma scar,
The stare of Medusa, the death in my eyes,
Numbing reflections, from senses deprived...

7. The Medusa Stare

[Voyles / Jarvis]

Walking out onto streets of blight and misery,
Where strangers glance then quickly look away,
With eyes that speak a thousand words in one,
From weathered faces lined with years of pain,
Gorgon gaze entranced, what is real in this land of lives exiled... out beyond the pale,
To eat the gruel and scraps of yesterday's false conquests,
Reliving each act in hollowed atrophy,
Tasting pleasures of the flesh in absence,
These countless ways we sacrifice and lose,
To live in stone, entrapped, ensnared, unblessed, unloved... then die...
Welcome to the other side, to be a face in the crowd unknown,
Where we all sing along to the tired same refrain,
Fed from birth, for what it's worth on gray cloud dawns, and black sky dusks
...Doom.

8. Dystopian Nightmares

[Kloeppel / Jarvis]

Born under black skies, with no expectations,
We crawl through our paralyzing pantomime of life,
Awaiting resurrection, the great unwashed seethe,
In quiet desperation we accept our condition fatally,
Is this the present?
Can we call this life?
And for the future... utopian, dystopian, or death?
Thirty million voices, slogging through the undergrowth,
As islands in prosperity, they fuel it with their blood,
In total separation, they scavenge for their daily bread
Forgotten citizens, a class in themselves lost at sea,
Is this the present?
Can we call this life?
And for the future... utopian, dystopian, or death? What have they worked for
...these dreams in the gutter, unspent?
Desire traded for dearth,
And Hope for destitution?
As eaters and eaten break bread,
They learn their trades in time,
But the teacher must be taught just as well,
And as such this tragedy unfolds...

9. Discordia

[Kloppel / Jarvis]

Line by line the artifacts spilling across a western world awash in imagery and apathy entrenched...
we dine together in here on stark, immiserating axioms, make our beds, dig our graves...
bled from this cold irrationality onto the corpse of a world...
we never asked for...

10. Pandemican

[Kloeppel / Jarvis]

...And through all our failed attempts we still proclaim our opinions law,
One small step into life and your taken,
Taken by a storm of fear,
You can't stop the fleeting of the years,
I sing a song of myself through the gaze of Narcissus,
A reflection of inert violence,
As your average American crusading in the name of man,
My reality is life in the backseat riding into foreign lands,
In my million dollar box of regret,
I'll spread disease to protect it,
My reality is life in the backseat,
Gorging on the blood of nations, gluttonous as I eat myself alive,
Heed the call of the Suicide Shepard,
When they jump I know I'll follow,
Is that our echo screaming down from the tower, now the martyr is your pilot,
The Captain is in his quarters, the Navigator's throat is slit,
A 7.mile stare with your eyes on the deep, feeding from their trough full of sheep,
Proclaiming your opinions law,
As your average American, always doing all I can,
My reality is life in the backseat, spiraling into the gyre,
With me my brand old weapon- It's called my clenched fist.







MISERY INDEX LYRICS