[Instrumental]

...I had a salowe vision
wherein were fiery serpents and scorpions and drought
...sand, in an abrasive swirling murk,
covered the crackled book of life...

A testimony
from the dimension of regret.
This voice comes
from the second right after the disaster
when all there is left to say
in a distressed whisper is
It is too late.
The irreparable has been carved in stone
and those made accountable for it are you.
Standing, shivering in cold dim light
waiting for the sentence of the Holy Dead
like Adam and Eve at the end of time.

One may argue that it was flawed
since the beginning
that the dice were loaded
that God had it all within
that He is the Source.
O heavenly Father!
pathogenic agent of contamination.
harbringer of catastrophe,
icon of the impending Fall:
but what difference does it make?
Altitudines Satana
the vertigo of Liberty
tipped the scales.
A shadow of horror is risen.

This will not be redeemed
no matter how sincere the genuflection
and ardent the confession.

There I stand, in a wood of trees pale as if bones
eroded by nefarious winds,
haunted by their barking echoes.
Were doubts to arise that God retreats slowly from this world
which until now renewed itself with every dawn
nurtured by holy breath:
behold those mountains
the rocks of which turn to ghosts
and those roots petrified in thirst,
vainly defying the opaque silence of hollow rivers,
and bury your doubts in a profane grave.

The greatest proof of justice and mercy
God's supreme goodness
and his loving caress
inhabit these abrasive pillars of dust,
the black veil at the horizon
soon to hush in velvet silence
your daughter's last breath,
crowning you the depositary
of ten thousand indignities:
the eminent king of a world in dismay.

Every singularity is filed down
by this continuous ochre stream.
The only memory and existence
those you cherished ever had
and ever could have,
the memory of the heart,
is overcome by the drought of the heart:
a desert with no life but scorpions
coming as a swarm, as a flood
with an abundance of deadly stings...
one for every remembrance
one for every comforting echo of the past
for blithe days of hope turned sour.

A desert with no life but scorpions
coming as a swarm, as a flood
with an abundance of deadly stings...
one for every remembrance
one for every comforting echo of the past
for blithe days of hope turned sour.

There are places
not to be found but to be recognized,
they sheltered a fire.
The fire wherein the acts of God
and the acts of men were to melt and merge
making it a a senseless chore
to distinguish the human from the divine.
God resides in such places
and it is where He conspires
at the devastation
of what took him so long to accomplish.
It is where the sentence matured and was declared
in joint responsibility.

Yet, wasn't this an act of compassion?
Like the shooting in the head
of a horse with a broken leg.
Your cry of revolt and disbelief
a brief caesura in the slowing
heartbeat of the world
as if a horrible new pain
had been given birth in abomination -
surges in vain the face the inexorable,
leaving behind but a meagre comfort:
there is no exemption for the offspring
of this withered womb,
not even for Chaos itself.
Who can reap the meaning
of this unstinted negation
of centuries and millions
before it sinks within the infinite depths
of that dun ocean?

[Instrumental]