1. |
The Argument
02:50
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You walked the frozen path
You crossed the ocean black
Inconsequential acts
As footsteps through the ash
Will your eyes be cast away
When they come upon the crater where you lay?
You climbed the iron cliffs
You stared through the abyss
Now scattered to the winds
As long-forgotten myths
Are they all a golden chain?
Is the unresolving cadence played in vain?
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2. |
Ley Line
04:37
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Lost in the fields of feeling
Locked in the need for meaning
Gloom of the humid evening
Shimmering wind
Makes my head spin
Swarm of the voices speaking
Chords of the colors bleeding
Smoke choking off my breathing
Glimmers of peace
Through the limbs of the trees
Just a stranger in a strange land
Raising the binding rafter
A maze underneath the chapel
Phase of the endless laughter
Echoing wide
And left far behind
Like a stranger in a strange land
Alien grey
The wandering stray
Spend my years waiting to be
Seen and set free
Lifted and carried away
Lines; golden intersection
Rise as the new reflection
And guide me to my ascension
Moth to the flame
The way is laid plain.
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3. |
Rocky Mount
02:20
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Bound to the rising Sun I flew
On wings of glass and steel
With visions, cradled warm and true
Asleep behind the wheel
Then came the unforgiving ground
To pull me from the dream
Three seconds of eternal sound
That ripped the axle clean
Why should I stand on solid earth
And safely walk away?
Some dim unwanted soul rebirth
To waste another day.
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4. |
Signal Tower
06:23
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Lift your painted veil
And face the sun
Let the wandering be done
Pale horizon bound
A million miles
Sever every binding line
Old futility and shame
Cast them all away
Risen from the ash, a spire
Shadow as your path
The azimuth, refined
Leave these dizzy spells
As memories of a dream
Drops of ether in the stream
Focus sharpen
Saturating lens
Clarify as you ascend
Faceless figures in the fog
Watch a moment, and move on
Risen from the ash, a spire
Shadow, as your path
The azimuth refined
Signal tower shaking with the waves
Radiation in the frame
Revelation and escape
...
The vein may try to roll and hide
But the needle finds its way inside
The claret drawn out through the eyes
In a life-preserving sacrifice
The plasma parted from the cells
Like a tortoise pulled out of her shell
Cannot survive or hold their shape
They bend, and warp, and dissipate
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5. |
Masque
03:29
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It's hard to put into words
They seem to spill out at random
The symbols all seem absurd, when you're
Too dumb to understand them
So the show spills on forward,
No time to recap
Feels like I slept through the first act
I wear a face optimized
To minimize interaction
A carefully improvised
Synthetic sterile abstraction
But consciousness gleams
Through the widening seams
The unrelenting stream
Now, everybody wants to play along
With the joke that we're all desperate to be in on
And the madrigal of conversation
Calls us to respond
and join the chorus line
The joyful noise of wasting our time...
If I seem under-rehearsed
It's never for lack of trying
My focus only gets worse
Knowing each moment, I'm dying
I'll flee through the neon-lit night of my soul
Free to fall through the fourth wall; I'm
Lost inside the role.
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6. |
Concord
03:34
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Snow-blind eye
Sunburned, silent
Vista wide
Vague horizon
Glowing ice
A choir of sirens
And the chrysalis is keeping us alive
The revelation may be waiting to arrive
The incantation we recite is
Some sad psalm
Lips left frozen
All is calm
In the life we've chosen
Days are long
And the window's closing
The ascetic turns his head away and hums
He is weightless, falling always to the sun
Beaming, singing, going numb
North my star
Can't ignore it
Come so far
Lost in orbit
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7. |
Apogee
02:10
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8. |
Fossils in the Making
04:40
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Distance kept from what we've meant to hide
Piecemeal loss of all we pushed aside
Find any reason not to look me in the eye
Life-forms desiccated and calcified
Fossils in the making
When out in the fog there's a light
And it keeps us turning at night
It's a grey filigree filling in
The empty vessels underneath our skin
Window shade; respectable veneer
Bending rays; the body rendered clear
Derealization of the ghost that I held near
Shallow breaths in the upper atmosphere
Quiet suffocation
As loud as alarms all in tune
Come the fracturing and the flume
Of the wasting disease creeping in
To leave us hollow underneath our skin
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9. |
Prism Cell
06:49
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Drawn through the eye of the needle and hung from the ceiling
Unfocusing sight in the faltering light of the evening
Paint to the ends of the windows to leave the edge seamless
Intangible images; clarity call me to witness
Gone to wander empty rooms
And turn the screws
I traded my feeling for some foolish fragment of wisdom
Buried my embers and read by the light of the prism
I'll stand indecisive at the threshold of my mausoleum
Or press through the paper-thin walls that divide me from freedom
Faces frozen in their frames
Begin to wake
Turned to glass
And golden wire
I'd swallow the ashes to recall the fire
If mystery leads me
Through a rift in the sky
And gravity's hands slip from my eyes
I'll let the flame fall
So the cinder may rise.
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10. |
(...?)
06:47
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So, tale unwound and told
And what have we to show?
Is it buried in the snow?
And gleaning through these tears
A pattern sharp and clear
I blinked and missed ten years
"You always knew
How this would go
Kept in the loop
The limit control
To weigh out the soul"
Things come back; it's recursive
And the curse is eternal
Stay on track; it will follow
Taste of ash; burnt out hollow
Will the circle be unbroken?
Are we well enough alone?
Fall, through matrices of stars
Where shape came to us all
As chaos from the dark
To which all things return
The spiral at the center
The cry that goes unheard
"No one can see
How this will end
Found and set free
Every line bends
As we all ascend"
Things grow back; it's resurgent
And the spring is eternal
Lay your path; it will follow
Rising grass of tomorrow
'Will the circle be unbroken?'
Do you really want to know?
...
Iridescent colors
In the pools of oil
Carved in bismuth crystals
The organizing principle
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Ryan Irby Richmond, Virginia
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