1. |
The Bad Monk
01:46
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In ancient cloisters on their frescoed walls
Were painted truths of highest holy writ
Which cheered the pious entrails in the halls
Whose temperaments were cold as they were lit
Back then bloomed Jesus Christ from every seed
And more than one famed monk, forgotten now,
Took for his muse the graveyard strewn with weeds And sang for Death as well as he knew how.
— My soul is now a tomb, grave cenobite,
I wander here in perpetuity;
And barren are this evil cloister’s walls.
O lazy monk! What will I learn to make
Out of the living dumb-show of my grief,
The labor of my hands and the love of my eyes?
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2. |
Spleen Of 1,000 Years
03:39
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I know more than if I’d lived a thousand years
Open your drawers filled with plastic souvenirs
Old journals pens and maps of city streets
Broken watches, restaurant receipts
My sad brain holds more than all these things you have hid
Buried in the sand; An undiscovered pyramid
With more dead than a dark collective tomb
I am a mass grave unmolested by the moon
Filled with ravening worms that track their necrotic prey
Their successful hunt brings my sweet corpse’s slow decay
I’m an old dusty boudoir filled with brown crusty roses
And outmoded dresses hung in moth-eaten poses
Where a faded Kinkade lighthouse watches the room
Absorbing open old stale deserted perfume
Nothing drags on like these endless days
I limp down the trail as the snow melts away
So boredom, that fruit of our sad apathy
Can germinate, blossom, and ripen eternally
Your time’s done, epoch of the breath and skin
What once was flesh is marble in the scouring wind
Unmoving in the hazy desert night
The Sphinx sits staring, eyes bereft of sight
Deep in the Sahara, her neck cranes from a dune
With the setting of the sun she finally sings this tune:
Ooooh!
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3. |
Alchemy Of Sorrow
01:28
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One might clad you like a bride in white
While another dresses you in mourning, O Nature
Send word to someone you are laid out on a stretcher
Say to another: splendor and light
Hermes, God of conjurers, I enlist
You gives me such gastritis
You’ve turned me into Backwards Midas
The saddest possible alchemist
Through you I change gold to lead
And heaven into hell instead
Deep in a shroud of tangled clouds
I find the bones of a friend long-dead
Along celestial riverbeds
I engrave tombs for the departed!
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4. |
Sympathetic Horror
03:21
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From that dark and twisted sky
As bleak as what is yet to be
Descend into your empty life
What thoughts? Playboy, answer me!
I love to live where its dark and unstable
I’ll not whine like Ovid, chased from some happy fable
Oh, Heaven splitting at the seams
You are the mirror of my pride
Your heavy grieving clouds will ride
Like the black hearses of my dreams
And your dark, red rays reflect
The Hell my heart has come to expect
Loves and respects
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5. |
To A Madonna
05:04
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I’ll build for you, Madonna, mistress mine
deep in my crypt of woe a secret shrine
And carve out in the darkest corner of my heart,
Far from abject desires and worldly art,
A niche, with gold and azure all about you,
Where you shall dwell, my dear amazed Statue.
On this polished metal trellis my Verses climb
Those bursts of gleaming crystal form the Rhymes
I shall make for your head an ornate Crown,
And from my Jealousy the finest gown,
O mortal Madonna, I fashion it for you
Barbaric, heavy, stiff, with greenish hue
Which, like a safe, protects you, precious dear;
Embroidered not with Pearls, but with my Tears!
Your dress will be my quivering Desire,
Undulant this garment, rippling like fire
Perched on the crests, reposing in the troughs,
Clothes with a kiss your body pink and soft.
Of my Self-respect I’ll make your Slippers fine,
The satin, humbled by your feet divine,
Imprisons them in a delicate embrace,
The contours of your toes they closely trace;
If I can’t, in spite of all my labors spent,
Carve a Moon of silver for your Monument,
I’ll put the Serpent who feasts upon my heart
Under your heels, for you to tear apart,
Triumphant queen, all pregnant with redemptions,
That hateful snake, grown fat on vile pretensions.
You will see my Thoughts like rows of votives lit
Before the Queen of Virgins’ altar sit
Starring all the azure ceiling higher,
And watching you with flickering eyes of fire.
Since nothing in me that you do not stir,
All will be offered, frankincense, and myrrh,
And up to you, white peak, in clouds will soar
My stormy soul, in rapture, to adore.
At last, your role of Mary to perfect
And mingle barbarism with respect —
Of seven deadly sins, O black delight!
Remorseful torturer, to show my sleight,
I’ll forge and sharpen seven deadly swords
And like a callous juggler on the boards,
Taking it for my target, I would dart
Them deep into your streaming, sobbing heart.
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6. |
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January hates the whole god-damn town
Spits out the icy wetness of her black disdain
On the pale corpses waiting in the cemetery ground
And the sorry living forced to face the sleet and rain
My poor old cat growls, as she’s wandering the floor
Seeking only comfort from her mangy coat
A dead poet howls, pacing right outside my door
Cursed to fail to speak with his ethereal throat
There’s a distant sub-woofer as the heat kicks on
The clock on the mantle clucks right along
As the cards are shuffled I can smell the stale perfume
Of a woman, quiet sickly and long-gone
The red Jack of Hearts and the black Queen of Spades are drawn
They sneer in rueful memory of their lost love’s doom
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7. |
The Great-Hearted Maid
02:59
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The great hearted maid that made you so jealous
Sleeps her sleep in the forgotten grass
I think that we should bring her some flowers
The sorrows of the dead are so much deeper than ours
And when October bares the trees to their bones
Blowing his somber wind around the headstones
The dead bear the living with such chagrin
To sleep, as we do, so snug in our linens
While they are consumed by black desolation
Without a bed partner, or soft conversation
These frozen old skeletons sculpted by the worm
Each winter snowmelt how keenly it burns
And the centuries pass without friend or kin
To replace the old tatters that flap in the wind
If some evening while the fire whistles and sings
I saw her sit, calm in her chair, placidly rocking
If on a blue and cold night in December
I found her by the fire, raking the embers
Solemnly returned from her eternal nowhere
To swaddle again the child raised under her care
How could I answer that pious soul in reply
When I saw the tears falling from her excavated eye?
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8. |
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What does God do with that stream of curses
Rising each day to the Seraphim?
A tyrant bloated on meat and juices
Who falls asleep while we plead with him.
The sobs of martyrs and the tortured
Must seem to him a pretty symphony
Since despite the pain and blood it costs us
The Lord will crave more eternally
O! Jesus! Remember in the olive trees
When in your simplicity you prayed and blessed
Him who in Heaven laughed at the sound
Of nails being driven into your flesh?
Did your thoughts fall back into the past
When you were told of His eternal promise?
You rode through town upon your stinky ass
Your fingernails and beard all caked with hummus.
You swelled with courage, were filled with hope
And whipped those merchants with a vengeance.
You thought you were their master, you stupid dope
Now you must suffer for your ignorance!
When my time comes I’ll be quite satisfied
To leave a world lovely only when we sleep.
I’ll live by the sword and by the sword I’ll die.
Saint Peter denied his master reasonably.
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9. |
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You would take the entire world to bed with you
Spoiled woman! Boredom makes love cruel.
To sharpen your teeth at your one diversion
You need fresh hearts to string up on the rack.
Your eyes, they shine like cheap storefronts,
Or street-fair Christmas lights,
Brazenly using their borrowed gleam
To insult the laws of beauty itself.
Oh deaf-and-dumb machine, you violent tool
You drink the coursing blood of all the world.
Have you no shame and have you not yet seen
In passing mirrors, your beauty spent and faded?
Does the vision of this evil
Cause you to stagger — you, animal!
Woman, vile queen of sin,
You master of depravity?
O gorgeous filth! Magnificent disgrace!
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10. |
Sepulcher
02:43
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Let’s say the night is heavy and somber
And some good neighbor out of mercy
Buries your body, the one we’ve all pondered
Behind a pile of old debris
Let’s say the prudish stars have ebbed
Closing their heavy-lidded eyes
Then the spider will weave her web
Then the snake will hatch her babies
Throughout many an endless year
The wounded cries of wolves you’ll hear
Wailing, yes wailing, above your skull
And the shrieks of ravenous witches
Lustful old men who clamor for riches
The whispers of bandits echoing through the rubble.
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11. |
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I’m like that king of a rainy land
A hard-weathered figurehead, a wealthy but withered young man
Just as bored with obsequious tutors as he
Is bored with his hounds and the beasts of his menagerie
No sport, not his falcon, no manner of toy
No not even the pleas of his suffering subjects bring him joy
His best fool’s lascivious ballads of death
Fail to distract from the pain of each labored breath
The Royal bed’s become his tomb
The ladies-in-waiting are waiting in his room
They whore themselves up in vain hope they’ll evince
An affectionate smile from their quarry; the skeleton prince
The alchemist who draws out gold from lead
Can’t elicit ease from the tired monarch’s head
Though ancient Romans bathed in blood-filled pools
This favored tonic among those who rule
Will never warm this corpse’s veins, they flow
With Lethian ooze; Thick tepid, green and slow.
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12. |
Grieving And Wandering
03:37
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Tell me does your heart ever try to fly away, Agatha?
Far from the green waters of this filthy city
To an island blue and magical
With waters of untouched virginity?
Tell me does your heart ever try to fly away, Agatha?
The sea, the endless sea consoles us in our prison
Some demon taught the sea to sing and the winds will let us listen
To lullaby our greasy eyes to sleep.
The sea, the endless sea consoles us in our prison.
O, how far off you are, and how far you’ll always be
My sweet dream of paradise
Where blue skies keep watch over our love
And each thing we’ve loved we’re allowed to love twice
Where the sinking heart can kiss the sky above
O, how far off you are, my love
O, love was like Heaven in those early days
Singing and kissing, asleep in the flowers
Behind the hills above the violins played
Carrying magic through the moonlit hours
O, love was like Heaven in those early days
That innocence I’m always longing for
Is it farther off now than my own end?
Through no human cry can the past be restored
No song I sing will ever bring it back again.
The innocence I’m longing for
The innocence I’m longing for
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13. |
Beatrice
03:46
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In an ashen land, without leaf of green
To the charred terrain I unburdened my spleen
I carelessly wandered at my heart’s request
As I honed my grievances against my breast
When at brightest day my head was plowed
into by a sodden stormcloud
And accosted by the villains inside
Some gang of trolls on a drunken ride
They considered me coldly and gave me the once-
over, like I was the village dunce
Furtively laughing and whispering
Trading winks and toothless grins –
“Let’s leisurely contemplate this lampoon
This would-be Hamlet, this slouching buffoon
His irresolute gaze and his discomfited hair
Such a pitiful sight, this old Devil-may-care
This tramp, this out-of-work clown, this wit
He sure knows his role and how thick to lay it
Trying to seduce, with his gripes and his pains
Eagles, crickets, –the sea! and the rain!
And even to us, who taught him in this hokum
He belches his diatribes–Don’t you just want to choke him!?” –
My pride is as high as the mountains, it’s true
I could have stared down that cloud and it’s crew
With a simple turn of my sovereign face
If I’d not next seen in that mob’s embrace
The peerless queen of my only heart
As the sun looked on without a start
She laughed with with them at my dark distress
Without a pause in her lustful caress
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14. |
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When the sky’s a coffin lid that’s pressing down
On my spirit, buried with with its prized ennui
The ring of the horizon changes round
To a dark day bleak as any night could be
When the world’s a dungeon lined with dripping stones
And Hope’s a bat that’s fluttering around
Smacking granite walls that crush its flesh and bones
Bleeding out, it suffers, twitching on the ground
When the streaks of rain paint the window panes
Like the steel-barred sills of prison cells
Dimpled spiders strain, spinning webs in our brains Work their loathsome skills as their egg-sacs swell
While carillons ring out their furious boasts
Roaring clanging howling tunes up to the skies
The highways are jammed with sad wandering ghosts
Reaching nobody with their impotent cries
Silent hearses hauling fresh-harvested souls
Ignore my curses–Pay no heed they’re full
Leave my slouched corpse to languish.
Through the kingdom they roll
As the Queen of Anguish plants her flag in my skull.
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15. |
The Litanies Of Satan
04:47
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You were most wise and fair of all the Angels young,
O god whom fate betrayed and left unsung,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
O exiled Prince borne down by many lies,
even mighty in defeat he does arise,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
The all-knowing lord of subterranean things,
Who remedies our human sufferings,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
To lepers and lost beggars full of lice,
You teach, through love, the taste of Paradise.
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You who on Death, your old and ever-faithful wife,
Engendered Hope — the sweetest folly of this life —
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You give to men condemned a countenance unbaffled
That they rebuke the thronging mob around the scaffold,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You have seen in darkness and can bring to light
The gems a jealous God has hidden from our sight,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You to whom the secret arsenals are known
Where iron, gold and silver slumber, locked in stone,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
Your enormous hand has hidden the abyss
From the sleepwalkers that skirt the precipice,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You who rescue from the trampling horses’ feet
the poor old drunkard who has fallen in the street,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You, to ease the wanderings of our troubled minds
Taught how sulfur and saltpeter are combined;
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You who form in subtle friendliness
the wealthy and the merciless,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
You pour into the hearts of women
A trifling love of blood full brimming,
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
Step-father of poor bastards robbed of pardon,
God in his anger exiled us from Eden’s garden
O Satan, have pity on my long misery!
Glory and praise to Thee, Satan, on high,
Where You once reigned, in Hell where you now lie,
Vanquished, silent, dreaming eternally.
Grant my soul some day to rest close to Thee
Under the Tree of Knowledge which shall spread
Its branches like a golden Temple overhead.
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