Lyrics

Stealer of Songs

Time is a vast

Interminable smear

If I awaken tomorrow

I’ll have lost another year

When it drinks too deeply

Of the air from these lungs

It’ll steal every song

That’s yet to be sung

Life is a hole

Never meant to be filled

Death is the shovel

You take up the hill

And when you’re done digging

The earth is a wound

You climb in your grave

Lament it’s too soon

It’s too soon

Caught In The Gristmill

To punish our wrongs 

Our contingent mistakes

The Lord smote these lands

With famine, war, and plague

The Angel with his key

Well, he opened up the pit

And an endless stream of devils

Have since poured out from it

We’re caught in the gristmill

Of Heaven and Hell again

The priest went off and died

Left me yoked to all my sins

Whether good or evil triumphs

I’m trapped inside this skin

The abbess birthed a cherub 

With a single damning eye

I pray the powers high and low

Will finally let me die

But I’m caught in the gristmill

Of Heaven and Hell again

When veiled powers come together

To secretly conspire

That the wheat and the chaff

Should both be fed to the fire

And when the righteous waste away

While the wicked glut their fill

Then what does it matter

Who’s running the mill?

Now this land is overrun

With corruption and blight

Crops rot in the fields

The Devil owns the night

I have no sheep to slaughter

And there is no grain to mill

My boy is buried ‘neath the tree

Beside his mother on the hill 

They were caught in the gristmill

Of Heaven and Hell again

We’re all caught in this gristmill

Of Heaven and Hell

The Danse Macabre

Death comes to Rome

Wherefore to summon the Pope

With the plague in a sack

And a lute on a rope 

The cold worms tunnel in

As hot life leaches out

So we wrest the squirming toad

From the barrow of his mouth

Croak! Croak! Croak!

Death descends next

Upon the great palace lawn

To pipe for the Emperor

And bid him come along

And his flesh, it goes soft

And his bile, it flows black

So we sew him up tight

In his funeral sack

Caw! Caw! Caw!

Death finds himself

In the castle’s great hall

And drums for the King

Who meekly cowers from his call

But his soul hisses out

As to Death he doth yield

So we burn him like trash

In the pit out in the field 

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Perfume your body

With camphor and lye

And dress in the finest robes

That money can buy

Take the hand that is offered

Though it’s cold as the clay

And dance into the ravenous

Mouth of the grave

Nearly done with his work

The labourer meets Death

And hoarsely sings to his Maker

With the last of his breath

His death rattle marks

The final end of his days

So we nail his coffin shut

Before his body turns gray

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Death alights last

Trilling far atop a tree

To lure a babe to its shade

While her poor mother grieves

And the pus runs so free

As flesh clings to the bone

That we chisel out her name

Upon the cold, lifeless stone

Tap! Tap! Tap!

Canticum Mortis

Lumen amittitur

Nos a celo deserimur

Cadimus sicut stellae

De caelo sparsae

Cadimus sicut triticum

A nostra corruptione

Cadimus sicut caro

Ex membro gangrano

Cadimus sicut Deus

Ebrius in ira sua

Omnis spes abiit

Regnum Dei cecidit

Lumen amittitur

Nos a celo deserimur

The Pardoner’s Song

I once dwelt in a convent’s walls

For faith I had forsaken all

Now I’m hollow as a tooth

And peddle wares instead of truth

My leather’s empty, drained of ale

So all I have is up for sale

From town to town I haul my cart

Just name the saint, I have his heart

Magna pestis vincit omnia

Talismans and vials of blood

A pouch of dried Golgotha mud

The stinking scalp of some dead saint

Indulgences to grease the gate 

Trinkets to protect from doom

Dusty bones from martyrs’ tombs

A peg leg carved from Calvary’s cross

Sacred dreck and holy dross

Magna pestis vincit omnia

You beg my pardon, it’ll cost a groat

Or meat and ale to salve my throat

Though faith moves mountains, hunger quakes

And throws down kings in famine’s wake

Death labors hard to reap this village

Like a serf yoked under tillage

Take your leave as you’ve no gold

More towns await just down the road

Magna pestis vincit omnia

Four Lost Brothers In The Mouth Of The World

Four sweet brothers 

All lost in the woods

Swing with snapped necks

Under four sackcloth hoods

And the baleful moon

A blushing bride before her groom

Will leave them all exposed

Four lovely sisters

Who call out their names

Should be wary what answers

From those fecund remains

For the baleful moon

Shows their skeletons strewn

And leaves them all exposed

Four seasons later

We do it all again

For the earth pleads for succor

And we dare not offend

Pray the baleful moon

Won’t come so soon

To expose what we have done

The globe shifts its axis

Light cedes to blackness

Everything in its turn

Think Upon Death While Your Grave Is Yet Undug

Though now thou art fresh

And smell of sweet life

And fill up thine hours with frivolous play

One day thou shalt hear

The dread trill of Death’s fife

And be turned to rank slime and foul clay

So before the last gasp

Of thy laboured breath

And worms make thy flesh boil and writhe

Sit thee in silence

And contemplate Death

While Saturn yet sharpens his scythe

The Cruelty of Youth

When I was born, my mother wept

When her son she did see

In through the door, my father he crept

His blade aloft for me

I did not fuss, I did not cry

I met his trembling eye

Then with his knife, he slew them both

In offering to me

He slit her throat and stuck his own heart

In offering to me

When I was but a babe of four

I took another life

An old man’s leather skin I tore

To craft a drum and fife

I banged my drum, I played my fife

As I cut down his wife

Their life bled out so slowly

And warmly ‘round my feet

Their blood ran red and stood in pools

Ablating sacred heat

When I was but a child of ten

I sent twelve more to Hell

I fed a poison treat to Gwynn

Then threw him down a well

His body softened with cruel time

And leached out poison lime

The well turned foul and caused the deaths

Of yet more blameless souls

His lily corpse did usher down

Eleven godly souls

My noble Lord, my lady fair

I speak the simple truth

I hold no blame for life itself

Is red in claw and tooth

Those these white hands are stained with blood

They add mere drops to the flood

I doff thy pointing finger, my Lord

‘Twas but the cruelty of youth

I lay my misdeeds at the crimson feet

Of the cruelty of youth

A Holy Stone

In the endless shadowed forest

Stands an old moss-covered stone

Like a pointing, bony finger

Jutting upward from the loam

And if we clear old leaves

And sour soil and fallen birch

We’ll exhume an ancient henge

Defiled and buried by the church

Doff your holly and your gown

And place your ear against the ground

And if armed with antler spades

We should dig up even more

We’ll witness what was swallowed

By primeval forest floor

And if we listen at the dirt-choked holes

That burrow deep inside

We’ll hear forgotten rites

In sacral space once occupied

Place your ear against the ground 

And hold your breath to hear the sound

For slumbering beneath our feet

For countless eons still

Are the ghostly wails and muffled screams

Of martyrs from the hill

And if we take their holy bones

And pluck them from the ground

What was profaned can be sanctified

The toppled can be crowned

Hear the sound and pay you heed

To the tree that sprouts forth from the seed

And casts its shadow o’er this holy land

A Hand in a Glove On Fire

Trumpets blare

Banners fly

Arrows shriek

A hand in a glove on fire

Steel and bone

Rivers red

A dreamless sleep

A hand in a glove on fire

Sun is snuffed

Dogs prowl

The covenant

A hand in a glove on fire

The Rambler’s Lament (Her Hair In A Locket)

I’m floating backwards

Across silver lands

I keep her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

My shadow beneath me

Carves a scar in the sands

I keep her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

Her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

Her name echoes cruelly

Again and again

I keep her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

The sun mosses over 

Black skies overhung 

The warmth from my lungs

Her name from my tongue 

Deep in my pocket

Sleeps a dull silver band 

I keep her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

Alone in the desert

Roams a penitent man

I keep her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

And though I harden my heart

Still her whisper commands

I keep her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

Her hair in a locket

In the palm of my hand

The Three Living and the Prodigious Dead

One pleasant day three knights did meet

To hunt and play, to drink and eat

But there within the shadowed trees

Familiar corpses numbered three

They rose up from the forest floor

Each more decayed than he before

And with the voices of the dead

This is what they hoarsely said

Your King atop his man-made throne

Feigned to hear God’s voice intone

An edict you were avid to obey

To take up the sword, to lay all to waste

You marched across the shifting sands

Loosed your true god upon that land

And so it goes until you’ve won

And sown the soil with children’s bones

We are your blood, we are your flesh

Born from the wives whom you caress

What you are, so once were we

What we are falls unto thee

The Holy Land’s a bitter lie

A shallow grave in which to die

Endless blood soaked into sand

To slake the boundless greed of man

And so you bleed yet more lives still

Which pour and pool but cannot fill

That burning hole inside your mind

That echoes Moloch’s hungry shrine

And so it went all through the night

With curses hurled from those three wights

And in their shadows, countless more

Smeared with their accusing gore

The veil of endless, lightless night

Was rent by blush of red daylight

They left those corpses bent and weird

For the Knights were all of them afeared 

And as the three knights fled

Those revenants pled

We are your blood, we are your flesh

The heart imprisoned in your chest

Lay down your blades and turn back home

To free us from this sour loam

Though these knights may learn their lesson well

And spare their souls from burning Hell

Chances are their sons will heed

Their master’s call to endless greed

And on and on, the maimed will crawl

And screams will rise and hope will fall

Into the grave, as all things do

Like our three knights and me and you

Anon and on and on and on

And on and on and on

And on and on and on and on

And on and on and on….

In Sickness

I love you in sickness

I love you in health

When the flesh of autumn fruit

Grows soft and black upon the shelf

As the blush of fair life

Falls from your alabaster cheeks

The whippoorwill sings

And takes to his wing

Stealing your power to speak

I love you in sickness

I love you when death’s

Corruption hangs heavy

On your sweet, shallow breath

I hold you in shadow

Kept safe from the sun

In the bed that we share

Incense perfumes the air

Our long days together are done

As our loved ones threw rice at our wedding

Let strangers throw handfuls of lime

We’ll share our plague pit with that party

Who witnessed our vows in springtime

Now those church bells solemnly chime 

I love you in sickness

With my last gasp of breath

I’ll sing your precious name

As I surrender to Death

And when he parts the curtain

To that hallowed other side 

Throw us both in that pit

Where the earth has been split

And we’ll slumber together inside