SILENT PLANET LYRICS

1. The Well

Mother, tell me story or sing me a song. It's a sacred sort of disorder how these sisters came along ¹ - of flocks of fools, and dozens of men who fell through their thrones into the abyss of again. ² The kings of earth, crippled with crowns, ³ and the cursed
criminal ⁴ who turned it upside down. So we shout: "Hold us together. Tear me apart." May our suffering sing the hymns we couldn't hear. "Hold us together even if it tears me apart." May our blood be spilled for the life of this world. ⁵
"Do you feel whole? ⁶ Will you see my face? ⁷
You are. I'm not, but you are. ⁸
Dead to conceive life that tells out stories.
"Hold us together. Tear me apart." May our suffering sing the hymns we couldn't hear. "Hold us together even if it tears me apart." May our blood be spilled for the life of this world.

[¹ The Seven Sisters of God's dream
² Revelation 21:24
³ Phinehas, 2011
⁴ Galatians 3:13
⁵ "For the Life of the World" - Alexander Schmemann
⁶ John 5:8
⁷ John 4
⁸ Mewithoutyou, 2006]

2. XX (City Grave)

This injustice renders my thoughts ineffectual. Forgive me, Lover, and forget my sullen face. Privilege brings us to this place of human currencies. (We) buried our sisters in a glass display, only to evaporate to a toxic skyline – underneath we sell off the bodies.

My body became a graveyard where they buried thirsty souls. Show me your righteous leader; I’ll show you the bullet holes. The preacher ¹ with the parched tongue and the “God” that he controls: “Shake off the sin! Shake off the sin!” And spit out your cacophony of lies.

I’ll climb through your screen and bleed out the image you left in me. ²

But God, are you man? Then how do you see me? From where you sit up in heaven ³, looking down on my hell. My body chokes back.
“I have nothing to draw with and the well is deep – where can I get living water?” ⁴

Enslaved in the “Land of the Free” ⁵ – my prison is our wedding bed where you left me for dead. You’ll leave us for dead. Apathy was our anchor to a digital sea ⁶ where you drown in the comfort of our complicity.

Can Love save me? Will Your wrath avenge us? ⁷

[¹ Our sister’s captor; Several famous pastor types – names omitted for legal reasons
² Sex slaves forced into pornography, speaking back to our collective male gaze.
³ Psalm 115:3; 139:8
⁴ John 4:11
⁵ America
⁶ Thrice, 2007
⁷ Deuteronomy 32:35]

3. I Drowned In The Desert

4. Native Blood

The barren wastes, bearing down on me.¹ Cracks in the clouds leave me wondering: Did the oceans dry out and return to the sky, for a privileged perspective of our final goodbye?

Pretend it's a house of peace while she's buried underneath. You built your Father's house over my mother's grave.²

Bodies - a mass grave collapse the concave floor. These sanctimonious steeples will meet us in the dirt. Because the earth is trembling,³ if only we had eyes to see it shake. Ignorant until we expire.

When the ocean fills our veins and the soil becomes my bones:⁴ Maybe we'll fall asleep tonight to the madness in the melody poured out for slaves.

We were dressed in potential now we're draped in sorrow.
Our race is a bloodstain spattered on a profane political campaign - manifest your destiny. Stripes and stars comprise my prison bars - the cost of liberty.⁵

Maybe we'll fall asleep tonight to the madness in the melody poured out for slaves. Maybe this storm is a perfect score for wretched bodies washed ashore, poured out for me.⁶

The life I loved looking up at me: saplings struck like daggers hemorrhaging streams as the breath of my people return to the ground⁷ so forests can once more abound.

The suffering cross that overcame,⁸ the name of Love made concurrent with shame.

This melody - I thought it familiar it sounds like your heartbeat keeping time,⁹ then you turn and remind me that this pain has a purpose. And maybe we'll fall asleep tonight.

[¹ South Dakota badlands
² Indian Removal Act of 1830
³ Proverbs 30:21
⁴ Inspired by a quote attributed to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe
⁵ The Dawes Act of 1887
⁶ Matthew 5:45
⁷ Psalm 146:4
⁸ Christus Victor
⁹ *irregular - JLW]

5. Tiny Hands (Au Revoir)

[feat. Natalie Nicoles]

I awoke in the summer the sun struck the earth to furnish us with fire ¹. But jealous hands fashioned their cross to a sword ², brandished their gift as a torch to burn the light. "To the dead we owe only the truth ³ - the human condition ⁴. Surveying the
space between the nave
I saw my own infernal grave - existential imperfection ⁵.
We sat scrawling out notes on scratched oak tombs bullets bouncing off the stonewall saints laid to rest by our Forebear ⁶ at their children, at the dissidence of despair. This proximal milieu could close the door to the closeness that keeps us inside the spaces that
we hide. My heart burns cold as life leaves my daughter's eyes. I am the mother of the dying, the dust, the denouement.
How can absence take my father's house? How can nothing take my daughter's life? Walk me out from this tomb. If you are the gate ⁷ could you make a way? Come down from that cross; hold our your hands so I can see ⁸.
"Je suis sorti vivant du dour crematoire. (I came out alive from the crematory oven;)
Je suis le temoin sacre de l'eglise. (I am the sacred witness from the church.)
Je suis une mere qui a tout perdu." (I am a mother who has lost everything) ⁹.

This fire burns your name on my lips; this smoke chokes your song on my throat. Now let death lynch my lungs, I offer what's left of this withering tongue. But oh, "No Exit ¹⁰" so bright as the light that shines behind the Son. I leapt through stained glass saints to
fall to the garden where we first begun.

[¹ June 10, 1944 to be exact
² Reference to the Swastika
³ Voltaire
⁴ Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and many others
⁵ Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others
⁶ Jesus -- the origin of the Church
⁷ John 10:9
⁸ John 20:27-29
⁹ A direct quote from the main character of this song, Madame Rouffanche, when she testified at a 1953 military tribunal in Bordeaux, France.
¹⁰ Sartre]

6. Firstwake

[feat. Joel Quartuccio]

You'd be choking on your flame, my Son without a name, made king¹ of all the wastes. And forever will swallow us alive, we'll be abstracted from time - we can let the tides wash over.

This is the epilogue to the introduction: Lost in the sound.² Hold tight all your systematic theories that help you to sleep at night, but remember that there could be no sufficient certitudes in hell.

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.³ Mother, receive me⁴ because I'm coming home to you. Does this cup⁵ run dry?

Look at what we've done again. We wage war in the name of love - using gold to fill the holes in your hands.

Caught in the paradox - juxtaposed between bifurcated black and white... and my propensity to fail you. Caught in the cyclical narrative of violence that invokes your name to justify genocide. They'll take everything.

We traded water for salt - something whole for something equally as broken as us. Now dying of thirst we'll write this out in blood and shut you in a stone cold time where the air rots out - leaving us alone. We chose to be alone. I was given to cup to quench parched
tongues, but I became drunk and lust lynched my lungs.

Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do. Mother, receive me, because I'm coming home to you. Does this cup run dry?
For they know not what they do.

[¹ INRI
² Underoath, 2006
³ Luke 23:34
⁴ Luke 23:46
⁵ Luke 22:42]

7. Darkstrand (Hibakusha)

[feat. Sean McCulloch]

Creation creates a void. My hand held to the glare of this burnt impasse; ¹ yours, necessarily on the other side of some sickly metaxis. ² You're caught in stasis, matched with mine. Quantify time with meter and rhyme to calculate a way to prove that you are alive.
Isolated, trapped between, a picture of you now stained on the street. Oh mother, teach me how to die.
In your shadow I saw to a distant future; your life was only a nominal fee. Signing the sound of silence, signaling the end. They took your life, mother, as a pretense to pretend. The hand that feeds us sat you down.
Covered my eyes, thrusted the styli, retraced the timeline to call it suicide. ³ Will you wait for me? Death was the chorus - our lives frames in refrain. Softly we sing notes better sung by our dead. I'd rather sleep and see you soon than die alone in the wake of
this nuclear catastrophe. We were made to create, ⁴ you spoke us out of nothing. ⁵ Out of the chaos we caused, naked we came, shadows we leave.
Salt of the Earth: ⁶ Preserve their songs, Light of World: ⁷ Burn out the shadows. Infinite echoes of stifled screams - the abyss you created will ever stare back into me. ⁸
Will you wait for me?

[¹ Our young protagonist finds her mother's shadow burned onto the ground by the intense heat emitted upon detonation.
² Plato, Symposium
³ Historians in favor of the American nuclear action feel that the bombing was justified in light of atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese armies. Also, many theorize that less human lives were lost by taking nuclear action instead of a full-scale invasion of
Tokyo.
⁴ Imago Dei -- We posit creativity to be the defining attribute of God's imprint on humanity.
⁵ Ex nihilo
⁶ Matthew 5:13
⁷ Matthew 5:14
⁸ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil]

8. First Mother (Lilith)

[feat. Rory Rodriguez]

Awake, awake your eyes - or forever fallen. ¹ Sister, can you see me through the boundaries of this garden? ² When every man will take your voice, every God will fate your end. ³ You planted paradox in the center of our humanity; my ambivalent proclivity for
insufficiency.
Should I sleep or should I die alone? Life to death or flesh to decompose. You captured me.
I'm awakened by a fate that screams: "You will bear the weight to give this world a beating heart that never ends."
Now bring me a love that will live and die by my every word I speak. Won't you lie in this bed that we have made? ⁴
I must become something more than this.
Should I sleep or should I die alone? Life to death or flesh to decompose. You've captured me.
Should I sleep or should I die alone? Life to death or flesh to decompose.
You've captured me.

[¹ Milton, Paradise Lost
² Eden
³ Lillith speaks to Eve
⁴ Adam speaks to Eve]

9. To Thirst For The Sea

10. Wasteland (Vechnost)

[feat. Nathan Mead]

We "won the War" ¹; we made a temple to thieves enshrining the great criminal who promised heaven without God ².
If we had sight to seem, to see the seven seas could cease to be or freeze in me. We'd shake this sudden sundering and subsequently cross the strait ³ and traverse the wastes ⁴. We'll beat your rifles to shovels ⁵ and dig a proper grave for our sons who saw the
end of God ⁶: Wasteland. the flag will fall with the wall we built ⁷: Wasteland.
Apostate to the State, Witness to the Dead ⁸: For you know only a heap of broken Image ⁹ and when you rid this earth of God we shall shelter Him underground ¹⁰.
Fall into the coldest wastes of wastes of humanity - darkening circles fed by deepening graves. "Death solves all problems ¹¹," your heart is a statistic ¹². No mother, no resistance... but still she precludes the grave.
They saw the end of God: Wasteland. The flag will fall with the walls we built: Wasteland.

[¹ The Soviet Union "won" WWII on the Allied side of the conflict but suffered far more casualties than any other nation involved -- an estimated 10,000,000 civilians.
² Joseph Stalin defied the spirit of Marxism-Leninism by taking on a persona of god-like qualities -- promising prosperity to his followers while exiling, executing, and starving large portions of his country.
³ Bering Strait
⁴ Siberia
⁵ Isaiah 2:4
⁶ The USSR's attempt to rid the nation of God
⁷ Prophecy of the events of November 9, 1989
⁸ The sacred witness, Lady Iulia de Beausbore
⁹ T.S Eliot, The Wase Land
¹⁰ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
¹¹ Joseph Stalin
¹² "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of one million is a statistic." -- Joseph Stalin]

11. Depths II

All the world was a dream I couldn't shake - in a midnight reverie of which I'll never wake¹ - that started mundane enough with an incessant tapping on the windowpane separating me from the storm.

Where inside I sat, me the loathsome fool,² with my head cocked sideways in confusion as my looking glass³ became a two-way mirror and you can watch me hide from everything on this living sphere. But don't you dare darken my doorstep,⁴ stranger - never a step
more. No, no, Nevermore!⁵ You see, I have this reoccurring dream where we snuck past scores of slumbering guards and fixed that rustic iron key to that lock to set you free. "I would bring you liberty!" Where in reality I'm a coward. I'm collateral matter swayed by
banalities of time and space. I'm a name without a face.⁶

My trepidation reached threshold and my terror turned to madness - when I awoke I was swinging at shrouded silhouettes and stumbled out the door where my anger was extinguished by this downpour. Compelled, void of volition, my steps propelled through this chronic storm,
where there in the clearing - throughout the gaps in the trees - dark smoke flickered from fire illuminating my unease. Like clockwork, seven sisters⁷ turned together in a circle, autonomy abandoned, they moved singular and perpetual around a dark blue flame where I
heard you call my name: "I am the fire that is never quenched, and I am the river that will not run dry."

When I slept in that garden,⁸ Lord did you see me as I was dreaming?

This is the end of everything. We'll lose our divisions and forget our names:[ix] the precipice of eternity. I caught fire, I caught fire, I caught fire and you'll watch me burn.

[¹ The dark night of the soul
² This song was inspired by a vision of sorts brought on by a brief spell of psychosis. Or maybe I woke into God’s dream.
³ 1 Corinthians 13:12
⁴ Revelation 3:20
⁵ Poe, The Raven
⁶ C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
⁷ The protagonists of God’s dream
⁸ Matthew 26:36-46]







SILENT PLANET LYRICS