An insistent sadness in the texture of things
Dusk, silence, iron chill
Loneliness in the bones
The sharpness of lengthening shadows
The grotesque transition from day to night
The fear and dread of you
All the beasts of the earth
And all the birds of the air
Every creature that moves along the ground
All the fish of the sea
They are given into your hands
Reasons are echoes,
Make no difference

Alone on the riverbank
The water cool and clean and swift
Black waters and rapid current
A tenuous communion I cannot name
I have to believe that pain is the teacher
Unable to envision even the barest physical certainties
Of the death of myself or those close to me
Living with constant pain
Sharp and thin like a needle
The haze of the forest in early November
An echo from the ageless hills
The quiet country of the past
Where weeping is hushed and marches are ended
An apparition in the woodlands at dusk
Touching in thin rooms at dawn's low light
Imprisoned in the subjectivity of my memory
What else can there be?
Drunkenness and some vague lonely nostalgia
For something dead long before my birth
I have to believe that pain is the teacher

The pathless woods
The lonely shore
The roar of the deep sea
The occulted screeching of owls in winter
The roaring of lions
The howling of wolves
The hopelessness at the heart of lust
The light that hangs above the fields
The church not made with hands
Lost portions of eternity
Too great for the eye of man or his moribund gods
All gone in a flash
The fear and dread of you
Look at it
Look it straight in the face
Look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly
Suddenly life has no meaning

Intrumental

Enemy battleships lost in the fog
Firing blindly into the endless deep
The clouds are burning
Another great disappointment
The infantile longing for death unveiled
Consciousness is nature's nightmare
History is our own
And from it we awaken one last time
Rotten grain spilling from our bodies
Dying without even once having loved
something more than ourselves
The inalienable right of a billion eternally-newborn kings
The suicidal pleasure of the human alone
Stranded in the solipsist's temple
Ours is the heritage of free men
Free of all power and meaning
Free of everything at last

A darkness on the edge of town
A flame burning through the forest
Wandering beyond limits
Clambering out on the precipice
We cannot return
What we have lost we cannot regain
It cannot be made right again
And so we are
Wandering the world of ash
Waiting for the end of the end
Dust is our food
Clay is our meat
Like water hurled from crag
To crag,
Down into endless uncertainty,
I now give you everything

Intrumental