SILENT PLANET LYRICS

1. Thus Spoke

Two years lost in a lightless sleep ¹
Not a star in sight since the Fall of the Machine. ²

Creation and invention collide to provide ³
A gap in existence:
A ripple in time. ⁴
As matter collapsed ⁵
I fell inside;
Crossing in a distant, deathless, dimensional divide ⁶
Where the sum of gravity granted passage and bowed.
The night god slept everything was sound

When the end began ⁷
...⁸

[¹ 7.1.16 – 11.2.18.
² Inhabit the Wound.
³ Genesis 7.
⁴ Madeleine L'Engle "Wrinkle in Time".
⁵ Album cover.
⁶ H.G. Wells "The Time Machine".
⁷ Friedrich Nietzsche "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
⁸ Bhagavad Gita 8.17 – 8.19.]

2. The New Eternity

Mother tell me, why do the waters make us sick? ¹
Who bleeds the heavens making the clouds rain pestilence? ²
Dropping fever, ³ like manna from the morning sky; ⁴
Gather your children and hold them as they die. ⁵

Panic humming in the palm of my hand
Silent vectors injected with the curse of man. ⁶
Bodies dissected, heartbeats redirected. ⁷
The past was dead. ⁸ Why did we resurrect it? ⁹

Strange fruit ¹⁰ grows on the vine ¹¹
Of humankind.
Beneath a bright synthetic sky
I saw the future die.

A web of wires in our mind
Weaves an empire down our spine. ¹²
I fear we've sealed our fate.
There's no escape
There's no escape: The New Eternity.

Strange fruit is growing on the vine
Beneath a bright synthetic sky.
I fear we've sealed our fate.
There's no escape
There's no escape: The New Eternity.

Germinating extinction. ¹³

The people unite when you dose ¹⁴ them with fear… ¹⁵
Relinquish their will, let their objections disappear.
Crowds galvanized by vapid words ¹⁶
And septic slurs ¹⁷,
Utterly transfixed ¹⁸
By the fiction of the "greater good." ¹⁹

Estranged in this age ²⁰
We set sail to the stars;
Return to the earth still unaware of who we are. ²¹
We've come too far.
We've come too far.
We've come too far
It's all I know.
The darkness didn't die,
No, we brought it home. ²²

I sowed a secret deep in the earth, but despite the world it grew
I knew all things could be made new.
All things will be made new. ²³

A web of wires in our mind
Weaves an empire down our spine.
I fear we've sealed our fate.
There's no escape
There's no escape: The New Eternity.

Strange fruit is growing on the vine
Beneath a bright synthetic sky.
I fear we've sealed our fate.
There's no escape
There's no escape: The New Eternity.

Cross the Great Divide and see
Light and Dark collide in me.
Shake the shroud of secrecy, ²⁴
Uproot the grim hegemony. ²⁵

The New Eternity

[¹ Revelation 8:11
² The U.S. program, codenamed Operation Ranch Hand, sprayed more than 20 million gallons of various herbicides over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1961 to 1971
³ Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, "The Vietnam War"
⁴ Exodus 16
⁵ The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to contaminated Agent Orange. Many due to pre-natal exposure.
⁶ Unit 731
⁷ Nazi Human Experimentation
⁸ COINTELPRO
⁹ The USA Patriot Act of 2001
¹⁰ Billie Holiday "Strange Fruit"
¹¹ John 15:5
¹² Frantz Fanon, "The Wretched of the Earth"
¹³ Monsanto Agrochemical Company
¹⁴ MK Ultra
¹⁵ Napoleon Bonaparte
¹⁶ Donald Trump's "MAGA" Rallies
¹⁷ René Girard, "The Scapegoat"
¹⁸ Carl Jung, "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious". And additional works on pageantry.
¹⁹ Jeremy Bentham, "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation"
²⁰ A recent study by Columbia University and CUNY shows depression increased significantly among persons in the U.S. from 2005 to 2015, from 6.6 percent to 7.3 percent. Notably, the rise was most rapid among those ages 12 to 17, increasing from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 12.7 percent in 2015.
²¹ Radiohead, "OK Computer"
²² "Operation Paperclip"
²³ Revelation 21:5
²⁴ Errol Morris, "Wormwood"
²⁵ William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"]

3. Northern Fires (Guernica)

Ration my breath
Terror clandestine in my chest.
Mangled, I lay on a foreign forest floor. ¹

Caught in an instant, divided by distance.
Alone in the fray, clutching my trigger I pray as I make amends with death on a distant shore. ²

Such is the fate of the nation state ³
(despite the myths they propagate). ⁴
The narrative never fits the crime.
Democracy's died this death a thousand times.

The masses kneel before the golden cross held by the priest ⁵ who bows at the feet of the king. ⁶

We stand alone in the dust of what could be
Fighting to find our humanity.

Bury me with my name in an unmarked grave
Another casualty to the vanity of history. ⁷
The war marches on after the killing ends. ⁸
Take our lives, colonize our minds. ⁹
I've been digging through timelines,
Historical bylines;
I find the fatal flaw in our design lies between thoughts we had and words we knew ¹⁰
Between what we're told and what is true. ¹¹

Who fuels the fascist? ¹²
A classist inculcating the masses in passes under the contrived countenance of contrition. ¹³

The victor writes the story ¹⁴
More often burns the manuscript.
Set fire to a pyre, cremate the crimes that they commit. ¹⁵

But the flames kept us warm,
So we bit our tongues and tasted scorn.

The bitter stench of finite men
Betrayed by the thieves they swore to pretend.
The bell will toll ¹⁶ and in the end lay only echoes of what could have been. ¹⁷

We stand alone in the dust of what could be
Fighting to find our humanity.
We stand alone in the dust of what could be
Nothing we fought for will set us free. ¹⁸

Throw myself, headlong, to the jaws of the beast: ¹⁹
The war machine that feeds for eternity.
Throw myself, headlong, to the jaws of the beast:
The war machine that turns for eternity.
Throw myself, headlong, to the jaws of the beast:
The war machine that feeds for eternity.
Throw myself, headlong, to the jaws of the beast:
The war machine that turns for eternity.

[¹ Spring, 1937. Spain.
² Ernest Hemingway "For Whom the Bells Tolls".
³ Leo Tolstoy "Patriotism and Government".
⁴ Plato "The Republic".
⁵ Religion as a means for sustaining the rule of fascist dictator Francisco Franco from 1939-1975.
⁶ Hugh Thomas "The Spanish Civil War".
⁷ Michel Foucault "The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge".
⁸ Richard K. Morgan "Altered Carbon".
⁹ George Orwell "1984".
¹⁰ Jacques Lacan "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis".
¹¹ Margaret Atwood "The Robber Bride".
¹² Anthony Beevor "The Battle for Spain".
¹³ American corporations, such as Texaco oil, that made large financial gains due to loyal support of Franco's nationalist forces in Spain, and subsequently Hitler in Europe.
¹⁴ Jawaharlal Nehru "The Discovery of India".
¹⁵ The Bombing of Guernica, 26 April, 1937.
¹⁶ John Donne "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Meditation XVII".
¹⁷ George Santayana "Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies".
¹⁸ Matthew 26:52.
¹⁹ Mario Savio.]

4. Afterdusk

First the auspices, ¹ they came dripping from the sky,
² set their course to the coast, black sand blazing in their eyes.
We woke and bore witness to a tarnished veil of gold;
Tiny corpses line the strand, obsolescence unfolds. ³

Intravenously,
Hypodermic pipelines seep toxins to the sea;
Adorning our shores with negligence. ⁴

Suffocate, immolate, cauterize the surface.
Poison dances in the sky.
Walk with me.
Walk with me and see our colonies breeding dystrophy. ⁵
Can you feel… feel the disconnect resonate, burn inside your chest?
Palpitating… palpitating pulse failing heart, cardiac convulse. ⁶
The violence we love, it's cyclical.
We rise and we fall, it's inevitable. ⁷

Is it fatal?
Is the fallout inevitable?
"It was all for nothing"
Spiraling out of control.

Misdirected decathect, ⁸
Both indirect and circumspect,
oh architect of disconnect,
in retrospect I now suspect.

Trace the hills with your hungry eyes.
Witness how, like an orphan's spine,
Cities protrude on the horizon line.
Greed will rise ⁹ and carve out the sky,
Blinding us to the repercussion.

Pull the blood ¹⁰ from the earth,
Leave a grave for your sons. ¹¹
Oil is the ink fueling missiles like pens ¹² writing oblivion. ¹³

Walk with me.
Walk with me and see our colonies breeding dystrophy.
Can you feel… feel the disconnect resonate, burn inside your chest?
Palpitating… palpitating pulse failing heart, cardiac convulse.
The violence we love, it's cyclical.
We rise and we fall, it's inevitable.

Is it fatal?
Is the fallout inevitable?
"It was all for nothing"
Spiraling out of control.

Is it fatal?
Is the fallout inevitable?
"It was all for nothing"
Spiraling out of control.

This violence we love,
It's cyclical.
We rise and we fall,
It's inevitable.
The violence we love,
It's cyclical.
We rose just to fall.

I followed the harm to the site of infection:
The exit wounds where we made our home. ¹⁴
We were gorged with the earth and drunk off the seas.
And now we die with the taste of decay on our tongues.

[¹ Sue Monk Kidd "The Secret Life of Bees".
² Colony Collapse Disorder.
³ Dr. Marla Spivak, TED Talk.
⁴ In the past 25 years, there have been more than two dozen oil spills in the US.
⁵ Inspired by a lecture given by Dr. Karen Seto at Yale University in 2014 regarding the unsustainable nature of urban growth.
⁶ According to the World Health Organization, 23% of all deaths and 26% of deaths among children under age 5 are due to preventable environmental factors.
⁷ Job 12:23.
⁸ Sigmund Freud "On Metapsychology".
⁹ Major fossil fuel companies spend nearly $115 million each year on obstructive climate advocacy.
¹⁰ Chief Plenty Coups "Crow".
¹¹ Isaiah 24:4-6.
¹² The Dakota Access Pipeline; Recent USA exit from the Paris Accord.
¹³ Elizabeth Kolbert "The Sixth Extinction".
¹⁴ Henry David Thoreau "Walden".
¹⁵ According to a recent Guardian report, 50% of all produce in the USA is discarded.
¹⁶ This song was inspired by the art and advocacy of so many Lovers. Thank you for teaching us.]

5. Visible Unseen

Speak to me in a language only lovers can understand.
Dance with me in a rhythm only lovers can comprehend.
One fist gripping defiance, other cradling the sacred inside of our hands ¹: Pariah.

It's the pain of becoming ² confronting what stirs within.
I wanted to show you apocalypse ³ so you could see just how this ends as it begins.

No place to rest your head ⁴,
no respite for an anathema.
Banished for the sin of honesty from the citadel of little hidden hells. ⁵

Pyroglyphic: I saw Your face inside the fire.
Monolithic: A dominance that dictates desire. ⁶
Ultimatum: Dual damnations dichotomize me.
Suffocation: Crushed beneath holy hypocrisy.

This isn't love. This is escape.

Exiled into the night,
left to navigate a world that negates our needs:
The Visible Unseen. ⁷

You're the weight I'll always carry through a world so cold.
You'll never walk alone.
We will find a place to lay our heavy heads.
These lonely roads will always lead you home. ⁸

Am I only flawed when I am alive?
Only your child if I live denied?
I ask of you, Benevolence, was I made just to be broken? ⁹

Our faith became a silver shield – insulated from compassion. ¹⁰
Praising the prosperity, ¹¹
repressing their identity. ¹²

I'll show you hell is a place –
it's in the secrets we keep.
Oh, God… How those secrets keep me.

This isn't love. This is escape.
This isn't love. This is escape.

Coerced conformity fixed on the dust in their eye.
Forest fires rage in mine. ¹³

I never thought to ask…
When you said she was asleep did you hear my disbelief? ¹⁴
The bitter irony, that I wait for God as she dies beside me.

You're the weight I'll always carry through a world so cold.
You'll never walk alone.
We will find a place to lay our heavy heads.
These lonely roads will always lead you home.

We found our place in the disconnect of neglect.
I know these lonely roads will always lead you home.
Until our paths converge give me eyes to see The Visible Unseen.
These lonely roads will always lead you home. ¹⁵

Speak to me in a language only lovers can understand.
One fist gripping defiance, other cradling the sacred inside of our hands.

[¹ Inspired by a couple I once witnessed marching for their rights at a political protest.
² Andrea Gibson.
³ Richard Rohr "Falling Upward".
⁴ Luke 9:58.
⁵ Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago released a new report on youth homelessness, "Missed Opportunities: National Estimates", which found that LGBTQ young adults had a 120 percent higher risk of reporting homelessness compared to youth who identified as heterosexual and cisgender.
⁶ Diana Butler Bass "A People's History of Christianity".
⁷ Tobias Bärmann.
⁸ Brennan Manning "The Ragamuffin Gospel".
⁹ Inspired by a conversation with a brave young friend, who is transgender.
¹⁰ Tony Campolo "Red Letter Christians".
¹¹ Prosperity "gospel" promulgated through the teachings of Joel Osteen and others.
¹² According to a 2016 report by the CDC, LGB youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth.
¹³ Matthew 7:3.
¹⁴ Mark 5:21-43.
¹⁵ Matthew 5:1-11.]

6. Look Outside: Dream

[Instrumental]

7. Vanity of Sleep

This is a love affair
With consumer despair ¹,
An emptiness I can call my own… ²
An arbitrary
Sanctuary ³
Where we deposit prayers to a dispensable god. ⁴

Welcome to the end stage age ⁵
Where joy is a pill and love's a prescription.
Vaccinated with an outward suspicion,
Isolation became our pre-existing condition. ⁶

Manifested drudge of my mass-manufactured consent… ⁷
But there's a gaping hole in my consciousness:
A deep that cries out to deep. ⁸

This is a love affair
With consumer despair,
An emptiness I can call my own:
An antidote for mystery,
Our indifference is deafening.

.אהיה אשר אהיה ⁹

There's a presence here ¹⁰
It stirs inside the static
Dissonance of discontent that refused to relent.

I built a home overlooking a graveyard to remind myself I'm still alive.
Yet you see a flaw still abides as I witness an ending that I can't contrive.

We watched a golden array
Of a casket parade
As wealth makes it's final display
To the ground.
I found it strange
That even in this place
Death became
Such a gainful exchange.

Give me something to hold,
Give me something that bleeds.
I'll scour the earth for my identity. ¹¹
Is there a cure for a sick society? ¹²

So rich in this world, so in debt to ourselves.
The network of life in such a disconnect. ¹³
How many times must we die this death?

Annihilation is all we are.
Desolation is everything I know.

All we are is all we love ¹⁴ and everything I know is destructible.
Artificial heart, obsidian soul: Encircled by dreams that are combustible. ¹⁵

We trade the Garden for Cities ¹⁶, the Tree for a Tower ¹⁷,
Surrendered our faith, became addicted to power.
I know that hope grows inside of the Wound ¹⁸
And I know progress is empty ¹⁹
I must Be Consumed ²⁰

So I'll dig through these masks 'til I find my face;
Separate from the false pretense I embraced. ²¹
It kills me to know that you'll never find peace.
You can have all the world but you'll never be free. ²²

Tear the stitches sewn across my existence.
Cut me out from this nothingness.

Dusk will come and lay to rest our fleeting, fading, silhouettes. ²³

[¹ Karl Marx "Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy".
² Chuck Palahniuk "Fight Club".
³ Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
⁴ Ludwig Feuerbach "The Essence of Christianity".
⁵ Strauss–Howe generational theory.
⁶ Martin Heidegger "Being and Time".
⁷ Noam Chomsky "Manufacturing Consent".
⁸ Psalm 42:7.
⁹ Exodus 3:14.
¹⁰ Many Rooms "There is a Presence Here".
¹¹ Nita Mathur "Consumer Culture, Modernity, and Identity".
¹² Émile Durkheim "The Division of Labour in Society".
¹³ Sam Esmail "Mr. Robot".
¹⁴ Concept of Homo Liturgicus by James K. A. Smith.
¹⁵ Matthew 6:19-20.
¹⁶ Genesis 3:23.
¹⁷ Genesis 11:1-9.
¹⁸ Inhabit the Wound 2016.
¹⁹ Jason Scribner.
²⁰ Dying in Circles 2016.
²¹ Martin Buber "I and Thou".
²² Mark 8:36.
²³ Ecclesiastes 1:3-5.]

8. In Absence

Find me in the silence, tell me where I've been.
The air is growing colder, the clouds are caving in.

I lost the sound of your voice in the winter sun.
I dreamed that dawn would wake us, but morning never comes.

I watched you go away.
I watched the colors fade.

I can't bear the pain of losing yesterday to a world of grey.

I found you in the shadows following a ghost.
I thought you felt my presence, but we were still alone.

Where do you turn when the corners of the room run from you?
And how it burns to be a memory lost in a mind you never knew.

I watched you go away.
I watched the colors fade.

I can't bear the pain of losing yesterday to a world of grey.

My fading sunset, swaying precarious in the sand.
Every grain a lingering moment, slipping through the cracks in my hand.

Disintegrating in the predawn light:
A memory eroded by time.
I'll turn with your reversing clock and describe the color when you can't see the sunrise.

I watched you go away.
I watched the colors fade.

I can't bear the pain of losing yesterday to a world of grey. ¹

[¹ Dedicated to those suffering from memory disorders, including their loved ones.]

9. Share the Body

Watching from the bottom of a strangers mind ¹
Vicarious life, chemical divide.
The epidemic of our time: ²
A voluntary genocide.

He's wielding a needle,
It's laced with ambition...
Set on finding forever ³
Or blacking out the friction. ⁴
She's clutching a bottle –
Conscripted prescription ⁵ –
Deaf to my dissent,
Void of all volition.

Injecting fire straight into the veins,
Nothing will cauterize the wound where I remain.
Ingesting tiny stars one by one, one by one...
I come undone. ⁶

Passenger to my own life:
Trapped inside, fastened to the vice.
Fading out, fading away...
Burning in a bliss you can't sustain.

Am I a hedonist or solipsist?
Barbiturate tourniquets drip, drip:
A sycophant's sea of delusion.
Drowning in an empty conclusion.

Come shoot me up into the night.

Blood Moon: The shadow in my skin.
The window of my soul was sealed,
But I'll still let you in.
Blood Moon: Shiver through my mind.
Only the need is real,
Feel whatever I can to make sure I can't feel.

All the hell in my veins
Can't dissipate the pain.
All the hell in my veins
Won't wash away your face.

So let us go then, you and I –
Watch the sky drift into sleep, etherized. ⁷
Collapsing stars condemned to their cosmic graves
Bleeding light for the gain of some far off race.

The fog hangs like thieves
There must be guilt in these streets
Place your hand on my wrist,
It's not like we'll be missed.

Do I dare shake the need from our skin?
Do I dare rattle the rust, corroding me within?

The lechery, the treachery,
Oh come, love, sit next to me.
This anatomy is built like tragedy.

Don't you know me by these scars?
These marks where I are?
I mean I am. I mean I was
I was supposed to be someone. ⁸

Blood Moon: The shadow in my skin.
The window of my soul was sealed,
But I'll still let you in.
Blood Moon: Shiver through my mind.
Only the need is real,
Feel whatever I can to make sure I can't feel.

Every fix is a prayer,
Every high a sacrifice.
We worship desire ⁹ at the altar of dependence.
I hit the bottom then it hit me back.

Incarnation of society: ¹⁰
"The face of evil is the face of need." ¹¹

[¹ Jordan Peele "Get Out".
² In 2016 alone, 42,249 US drug fatalities -- 66% of the total -- involved opioids. This number is higher than breast cancer fatalities. – cdc.gov.
³ Common "Finding Forever".
⁴ Death Cab for Cutie "Blacking Out the Friction".
⁵ Nearly 80% of heroin users reported misusing prescription opioids prior to heroin. – hhs.gov
⁶ As Cities Burn "Come Now Sleep".
⁷ T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
⁸ Inspired by a conversations with dear friends I've met on tour, names held in privacy.
⁹ David Foster Wallace "Infinite Jest".
¹⁰ In the moment of fatal overdose, we see witness the telos of American society.
¹¹ William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch".]

10. Firstborn (Ya'aburnee)

You bury me.

Glass clouds shed their autumn skin
Kiss the mourning stems as they bow to the wind;
Heads hung like wartime mothers
As the congregants struggle to console one another.

We're bandaged together, soothing the surcease.
Huddled inside the fog – beneath the barren trees. ¹
Budding youth, unfettered by absolutes:
Do branches wither first when there's blood on the roots?

Can you stretch a moment into a thousand?
"Away from the quiet collapse of it all." ²

I know the
Know who knows you,
I see the
See who sees you.

I'll follow you into forever. ³

I memorized your pain,
I put my thoughts inside your name.
Little Light, can't you see?
You're supposed to be the one who buried me.

I tried to stop the flood.
I tried to pull you from the tide;
Now you paint the sky with distant fire.

The room lay quiet, sowing silence
Watching lifelines stream through wilting arteries.
Dreams crash with awe behind your roving eyes. ⁴
How I envy the calm that occupies your mind.

Drifting just above the flatline
That keeps your thoughts displaced from mine.
I can't divert the current,
I divide and wash ashore.

I'll try to write you to rest
Plant you inside my prose. ⁵
Yet my resolve,
Does it shake beneath a four-foot casket shadow.

The ink has spilled across the page,
Shaping surviving sun to shade. ⁶
Valleys and peaks, in grief,
Descend into a ceaseless sleep.

See how the night unfolds
Constellations welcome you home. ⁷
Adrift in the river beyond our memories...
You bury me.

I memorized your pain,
I put my thoughts inside your name.
Little Light, can't you see?
You're supposed to be the one who buried me.

I tried to stop the flood.
I tried to pull you from the tide;
Now you paint the sky with distant fire.

I memorized your pain,
(I memorized your pain)
I put my thoughts inside your name.
Little Light, can't you see?
(can't you see?)
You're supposed to be the one who buried me.

I tried to stop the flood.
I tried to pull you from the tide;
Now you paint the sky with distant fire.

[¹ Robert Frost "Nothing Gold Can Stay".
² Scott Derrickson "Dr. Strange".
³ Luke 23:43.
⁴ In loving memory of Matthew Leon.
⁵ C.S. Lewis "A Grief Observed".
⁶ Depths I.
⁷ 1 Thessalonians 4:13.
⁸ In loving memory of Xander Solomon Hendriks.]

11. Lower Empire

Bind the wrist, cut the tongue, call it "Liberation". ¹

Invader, you dare make me a stranger.
Invader, you brand me as a traitor. ²

These borders were forged in loss
Painted with a martyr's forgotten blood. ³
Legions of stone infecting the land,
Legions we carved into the palm of God's hand. ⁴

Stigmata cities stitched together with walls
Intent on sanitizing the sedition of our dark traditions.
We begin with the purest of intentions,
Then fabricate the cruelest inventions.

Interpret the subtext: "S – O – S".
Euthanized with euphemistic lies,
Populace of blank binary minds. ⁵
Appetite for endless apathy
Breathing in...in...insecurity. ⁶

Until you see your reflection through the scope of a weapon nothing will ever change.
A revolution stirs in the silence.
The movement defies this negative space. ⁷

I hear you through the noise:
The truth that speaks in silence. ⁸
Scale the divides we devise.
We locked out the world, but we're locked inside.

I hear you through the noise:
The hope ⁹ sung from the margins. ¹⁰
My heartbeat just a step behind,
I didn't know your name but I knew we were out of time.

Nuclear families split apart like the atom; ¹¹
Demagogues ¹² proliferate the calloused grip of the state.
The future asphyxiates under nativist suspicions.
Insipid minds... domestic fission.

Bind the wrist, cut the tongue, call it "Liberation".
Bind the wrist, cut the tongue, call it "Liberation".

Thirteen, cold as a stillborn – wounds still warm in his chest. ¹³
Behold the crimson lens, peer through the gaps in the flesh.
Bullets raining from Babylon: ¹⁴
The price of wealth.

How can you resist this cycle if you can't resist yourself? ¹⁵
What a world we knew
Before we fearfully
Withdrew to our silent cells of solitude...
But still I hear you.
I hear you.

I hear you through the noise:
The truth that speaks in silence.
Scale the divides we devised.
We locked out the world, but we're locked inside.

I hear you through the noise:
The hope sung from the margins.
My heartbeat just a step behind,
I didn't know your name but I knew we were out of time.

[¹ George Orwell "Politics and the English Language".
² Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States".
³ Howard Zinn "A People's History of the United States".
⁴ Psalm 95:4.
⁵ Edward Said "Orientalism".
⁶ Matt Stone and Trey Parker, "South Park s16e10".
⁷ "Everything that Rises Must Converge" 2012, MKQ.
⁸ Mother Teresa "In the Heart of the World".
⁹ James Cone "God of the Opressed".
¹⁰ Nelson Mandela "Long Walk to Freedom".
¹¹ According to Prison Policy Initiative, America currently has the largest prison population in the world at 2.3 million people.
¹² All USA presidents. Currently and noticeably, Donald J. Trump.
¹³ Hector Pieterson 1963-1976, shot and killed during the Soweto Uprising.
¹⁴ John Howard Yoder "The Politics of Jesus".
¹⁵ Matthew 16:23-25.]

12. Look Inside: Awake

[Instrumental]

13. The Anatomy of Time (Babel)

Certain was the fear trembling in your father's chest
Encountering the ancients ¹ in a graveyard for those who never rest.
"Even the wind lay still," ² as time revealed the fools we are.

Quiet monoliths appear,
Suspended in the air. ³
Solemn in their countenance, impervious to fear.

Marveling at the symmetry that binds and brings us here
Separating threads of space, distinctions disappear.

Take all of your answers
Throw them in the flames.
I'll keep the questions,
I'll take the rain. ⁴

Defend all your doctrines
Those lies you had sworn.
I'll wander through the night,
I'll sleep in the storm.

I'll follow you to the end.
I'll weather the world.
I'll sleep ⁵ in the storm.

I'll follow you to the end...
Where time has no beginning.

I pulled the past apart
Future's unraveled with its plans.
To my chagrin the answers
Felt hollow in my hands.

Adorned with memories that form the tapestry of life.
Collective accounts of consciousness from virtue to vice.

"Where are you now?"
My voice echoed in that canyon.
I turned to find you lynched,
Choking with abandon.

The scope of time, at first profuse,
Now twisted to the shape of a noose.
We wanted see forever,
But instead we saw the truth.

Species of the nightmare, ⁶
People of the dream: ⁷
Language is your prison, ⁸ but also the key.
Confront the heart of fear;
Behold the shape of destiny.

Spinning in the circles, ⁹ waltz with the sun.
"There's no time, many turn to one." ¹⁰

Take all of your answers
Throw them in the flames.
I'll keep the questions,
I'll take the rain.

Defend all your doctrines
Those lies you had sworn.
I'll wander through the night,
I'll sleep in the storm.

I'll follow you to the end.
I'll weather the world.
(I'll sleep in the storm.)

I'll follow you to the end.
I'll weather the world.
Where time has no beginning.

Blinded by shadow of what we've seen
Empty in our depths of understanding.
Burdened with the weight of paradox,
I fear we have been sentenced to be free. ¹¹

[¹ Denis Villeneuve and Eric Heisserer, "Arrival".
² MeWithoutYou "Paper-Hanger".
³ Ted Chiang "Story of Your Life".
⁴ Wesley Jensen.
⁵ Dayseeker.
⁶ C.S. Lewis "Out of the Silent Planet".
⁷ Robert Zemeckis, Michael Goldenberg, James Hart, "Contact".
⁸ Ludwig Wittgenstein "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".
⁹ Arthur Schlesinger's "Cyclical Theory".
¹⁰ Heptapods, speaking to humans in "Arrival".
¹¹ Jean-Paul Sartre "Being and Nothingness".]

14. Depths III

I knew one truth, and that truth was the sea.
Cold and knowing, it saw the coward in me.
And as the stain of epochs lines my tongue,
I choked heavy on the past, too numb to speak back.

We're each abandoned by the hands of time
That set us down to sail circles ¹ across a straight line.
Sister moon, are we all that's left?
Just a silent satellite and the sigh of flesh. ²

Come down!
And rest your lunar head on my breast,
Listen to the terror tear at my chest.
Our masts in tatters, oars shattered,
Feel free to pull me back to the vast, unforgiving mass.

Should we call this art
My falling apart?
The tangents of an imbalanced heart.
As matter multiplied,
I divide...
But I digress
The deprivation is taking effect.

You said if I stood against my darkness,
Not all of me would die. ³
But all I see on the surface is a shadow
And it occurs to me this could mean suicide.

When you went quiet ⁴
I turned to silence, ⁵
Seven sisters ⁶ draw me back across the moor. ⁷
Could you still love me in my leaving?
Would you remember me by the moments we forgot?

And as the waves slapped at my raft,
I cursed the fate – like our vows,
They broke at the bow.
Flanked by the mist
I inhaled the breath of existence...
Then you called me for one last time:

"I am the wind – the Be and the Still.
I am the Depths, the Immeasurable Will."
And when I awoke in that Garden,
Lord, did you see me as I was dreaming?

I locked eyes with the storm,
The sky sank down to receive the fury of the sea.
The abolition of my being, ⁸
The precipice of eternity. ⁹

Incandescence burst through the black,
The veil was torn ¹⁰ as the void collapsed.
The rains will subside.
Be my eyes, ¹¹
Show me hope in the maw of the night.

Our fractured pasts fall into one,
A dozen stars ¹² collide as a perpetual sun. ¹³
And as we disintegrate,
Will you be the
Fire that burns in my lungs?

Breathe me in.
Watch me burn.
Come breath me in.
Breathe me in.
You'll watch me burn.

[¹ Eternal Return.
² Charles Bukowski "Alone with Everybody".
³ Phinehas "Moriar".
⁴ Shusaku Endo "Silence".
⁵ John of the Cross "Dark Night of the Soul".
⁶ The protagonists of "The Night God Slept".
⁷ Depths II.
⁸ C.S. Lewis "The Abolition of Man".
⁹ Depths I.
¹⁰ Matthew 27:51.
¹¹ Dallán Forgaill "Be Thou My Vision".
¹² Every apocalypse we shared on this journey.
¹³ Dante Alighieri "Paradiso".]







SILENT PLANET LYRICS