The Northern Wind over Glacier Park,
Carries the musk of the elken rut:
An ammonia stench, thick with lust,
The scent of battle, death and conquest.

A lone pair of antlers crests above the harem,
Thirty cows drinking at a Logan Pass creek.
The bull elk spots shifting light between the trees
Another young challenger to his throne.

From the wood, a bugled shriek
The females freeze, lift their heads and stare
A rival bursts from the brush,
And charges for the leader of the pack.

Skulls collide
Punctured hide
Beaten pride
Nature's guide is war

Fight to the death.

Panting and stumbling
Resolve is crumbling
Bloodlines: their wager
Their lives in danger

One
Final
Charge
To end it all

Elk clash, the young buck
Swifter, his horn stuck
Through his elder's eye.

Antlers like lances
Entwined, he dances
With the cadaver
Of his enemy.

"To Hell with Boston's urban sprawl,"
Said I to you, dear wife,
"We'll hitch our wagon to the Western call,
Give the children a better life.
For what's now sand,
With these hands,
Will become
A garden."

The Sodom of the east behind us,
Rain will follow the plow.
Heaven smiles upon us,
For rain follows the plow.

I worked that land with all my worth.
'Exposed the soil to the sky.
The fields simply would not birth
Our crops of wheat and rye.
Then I'd doubt
That the drought
Would ever cede
To showers.

Government deception
That rain would follow the plow
May God shine grace upon us
So rain may follow the plow.

Manifest
Destiny:
The railroad's
Tyrany.
Cholera,
A child's loss,
Husbandmen
On the cross.

The American dream has died.

Now I kneel before your grave,
Monument to my mistakes.
The soil that I toiled
Never gave, but now it takes.
And I pray
Every day
That with this gun
I'll join you.

No mana from the heavens
No rain to follow the plow
This desert masks no Eden
No rain followed the plow.

When dogs lick the corpses
Of the soldiers who fell,
Stomped by the Trojan horses
The four horsemen ride to hell,
When town criers shout nonsense
And generals shoot the sand,
When kings hide behind pretense
So the blood keeps off their hand?

You ignore the carnage,
Living just because you spawned.
Saying nothing takes no courage:
Your inaction hangs the wronged.

Conception
Deception
Recession
Ride.

When dead gods roll back boulders
To crush human intellect,
From patriotic shoulders
Electing martial architects,
When taxation starves the poor
To feed kakistocracy,
When a nation forces war
To spread false democracy.

You steal a blind man's eyes
To eclipse a moon charred red.
In the dark you trust the lies
Because you fear the dead.

Conception
Deception
Damnation
Ride.

The blind all watch you riding
On those Trojan horses too.
The truth is not worth hiding:
You are Death, and Death is you.

When bushes burn with napalm
And they only chose to say
"The storm's before the calm,
Just shut your eyes and pray,"
When books deem some the chosen
And all others marked for death,
When sand dune suns have frozen
And the zephyr lost its breath?


You call your Trojan horse
And ride into the dim.
Its hooves know no remorse,
The world crumbles at its whim.

Conception
Deception
Redemption
Ride.

In a Spanish synagogue,
Two hunted brothers pray,
May God shroud them in the fog,
May night never turn to day,
May the clergy never find them,
Never torture, never burn,
Never die in dungeons dim,
To satisfy the worms.

Two brothers, two doors:
One sacrifice,
As the molten steel pours,
One succumbed to vice.

When night wilted, withered by dawn
Guardsmen broke the temple gates.
The two brothers had never gone,
Simply kneeled and welcomed Fate.
In prisons built on Christian zeal,
Both brothers were strapped to racks,
With each rotation of a wheel,
Ropes would pull apart their backs.

Priests tore the nails from their skin,
'Command heretics to convert.
They chose the quieter of the kin:
Each wheel's turn dug a foot of dirt.
When this brother snapped in half,
The other begged the guards to stop:
"I renounce the devil's path
Christ leads to heaven's mountain top"

Two brothers, two doors
One sacrifice
As the molten steel pours
One succumbed to vice
Which succumbed to vice?
Which succumbed to vice?

Man lives on bread alone.

In the deserts of the East
I met a wild, winged beast
Drinking sand and eating stones.
"You there, let me chill your bones,"
Said he of the porcelain grin,
"Your month-long fast has gnawed you thin."
Indeed the vultures thought me dead
So I drank his water and ate his bread.

The creature soothed starvation's sting
And moved the son of man to sing
The Ballad of the Beast.

Salvation
Salvation
Starvation
Starvation

We walked to the city gate,
Where he revealed my tragic fate
To die impaled on a tree:
The end my father chose for me.

Temptation
Temptation
Temptation

Atop the ancient temple's roof
He claimed one leap would serve as proof.
I jumped -- an angel took his bet,
Caught me, and whispered "not quite yet."

Snatched from Death by gilded wings,
Fortune beckoned me to sing
The Ballad of the Beast.

At the zenith of the mount
Where people are too small to count,
My friend pointed to the land.
"You could hold this in your hand...
If only you'd shake mine."
As I did, the sands of time
Shrieked and cowered at my feet,
The trumpet blare of Fate's defeat.

Newly crowned the only king,
I ordered all my pawns to sing
The Ballad of the Beast

As I danced upon the sea,
Mermaids dying under me,
As I danced upon the sea,
I knew I was free.
Free.