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Akuji

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Wow, I'd forgotten how far this thread had derailed. I love it. Makes me miss Iceni being around.

I figured I would post my latest lyrics, since I finally finished doing vocals for the EP. I'm proud of how the vocals came out, for the most part; and pursuant to our other recent discussions, the lyrics made their own requirements of the vocal performances, which forced me to try to be more expressive. Eh. My voice will recover in a few days.

____

01 - Denial:
I remember the dawn stillness: warmth of fire on the hearth, soft whispers in the darkness, and the first pale light of morning. Long indeed must be your arm, to take this all away from us.
 
May every child be stunted and scorned. May all their lives be short and forlorn, and your sorrow be bitter and long before you can die from the pain of it.
 
The sun before us seemed to balance on the edge of a knife, and we watched from below as the world outside went dark, and filled with enemies. I remember a long silence, bodies left where they fell, a river running dry, forest made of ash. Black smoke rose like a mountain overhead. Scars and pits on the land where children should have walked, and grown to be strong. The song is dead in their throats, blown away on the wind.
 
Men; you're only mortal men, but you never could be appeased, no matter how we bled, no matter that we fed your bodies with our own. Smoke should cover the sky, but instead the air is clear. The same earth that once bore our rape now bears fruit again. All our lives are patterns drawn in sand, every hope and fear described therein lost to the flood and washed away.
 
May you labor for every breath. May your dreams be only of death. May your life be thick with disease, not a moment's relief from it. Every shackle you bound to our flesh, every mark from every lash, may you suffer the heart of it.

 
02 - Solace:
Out past the rounded stones, your footprints slowly fade, until the receding tide washes every trace away. I know you were only water, at the beginning of all things - granted the power to run free, cutting a course from the mountain's heart with no knowledge of loss. Someday, you will be broken, and learn the meaning of pain, and take no action, content with empty regret and unconquered depths, a failure of pride destroying the small things you could have protected, the lives you should have held close.

How is it, when young men think of violence, they're oblivious to anything but release, ignorant of the slow torture of decline, even as they're ground down into dust? When the sick hunger deep in your swollen flesh devours you from within, come, take solace in this - you could never have changed anything.

Finally, the old man embraces silence, with the urgency of a coward avoiding pain. After all, you're only water, and the path that led you here was wide; like all water, carving stones, quenching fire, etching bones, and finally disappearing, lost under the sand. Are you everywhere at once, or did you drown where you fell?

 

03 - Hecatomb:
Surrounded on all sides by the hungry and the weak, waiting with their mouths wide. Everyone gets a piece. When those unkind hands stretch and bind my limbs, are you part of it? The stone under my back, weight upon my chest? All that I can do is keep my mouth shut tight.

Your prayer is my body; anointed and burned, or hanging in the air, a feast for common eyes, a penance for the powerless mob. Given up into the sky, a devotion fit for only ravens, picking apart my skin. If enough men bloody their hands, blood will not be a stain. No debt, no pain, no guilt, no more shame.
 
In the later years, you'll talk of a higher law guiding your hand, as if justice wanted death. But the truth of it can never be erased: all the lives you waste, ashes on fallow fields. Everyone here is a criminal, finally. I'm lying dead in the soil, innocent, ignorant, gone.

 

04 - Capture:
I would run like a beggar does, with his arms outstretched, heedless of the pain, thirst above all else. What about the years we spent patiently waiting? Went by in a blur, gone into the storm. I can go this far, no further. The light I saw in the distance was not the gleam of some high star; only a flickering reflection, a dream of misdirection, the taste of swallowed hope.

Wherever I go, I will walk like a leper does, bell held out in front; walk like a supplicant, quivering naked before his lord. I never belonged here. Though you might be only inches away, it may as well be miles. This far, no further. No hard bright scars or open wounds; only a fire that died too soon. 
 
This is not a divine nectar, but I'll drink it till it's gone. Let the walls close in around me. You're reaching out to find me. There's nothing left.

 
05 - Attrition:
The only fragments I can recall are disjointed and confused: skin, the laughter of children, tangled limbs. Vomit and blood in my throat. The sky dissolves in a blur.
 
I have never accepted change with any grace. Sometimes, I yearn for the safety of being confined, the weight of years finally thrust aside. Left here alone, in silence so thick I choke.
 
Nothing else worth repeating - empty room, days without food, months without words. A harsh white light that never turned off. A hole in the wall for air, a hole in the floor for shit. In time, I learned to give thanks for all of this. I went to sleep; someone else woke up. 
 
The air that I breathe is clean. The sun on my skin is warm and kind. But when I cower and shrink from you like a child, when I claw and scratch at the walls like a dog, until I bleed, I'm where I belong.
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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, Requiem said:

Great lyrics, FA. It can be hard to make lyrics effective out of their musical context, but yours have a real poetic quality that are really enjoyable. 

Thank you. :) I almost never wind up exactly where I intend to be with lyrics, but these are close. The title track (Attrition) was sort of a keystone that helped them come together around a common theme. It was loosely inspired by Vincent Cochetel's account of the time he spent in captivity while doing foreign aid work in Chechnya.

The EP is in its final stages now. Can't wait to have it done! Hopefully you'll enjoy the music as well.

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1 hour ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Thank you. :) I almost never wind up exactly where I intend to be with lyrics, but these are close. The title track (Attrition) was sort of a keystone that helped them come together around a common theme. It was loosely inspired by Vincent Cochetel's account of the time he spent in captivity while doing foreign aid work in Chechnya.

The EP is in its final stages now. Can't wait to have it done! Hopefully you'll enjoy the music as well.

Ah yes, Cochetel. I thought I recognised that event in there. ;)

I'll have to give the EP a listen to see how it all comes together. 

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  • 11 months later...

wrote this a few days ago after meditating on the creeping apocalypse, but since I may actually be singing this in a song, I won't share it in full, just the second verse :

I tread over the broken stones
of Hammurabi's law, the father’s law
in & out of many worlds, I rape
to awake the quantum devouring core
I am the meditator of Ragnarok
the Deity of All, None, One
I am the indefinite tremours
that lives by the power of his origin

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