Album: Decompositions, Volume I, Chapter 1: Rites Of Initiation (2011)

Way Of Ever-Branching Paths

["Reality is not always probable, or likely." -Jorge Luis Borges]

At your doorstep
Cloaked in negative space
First frost aches
To lay its claim

At the threshold
Between without and within
First foot prints
Disgrace the virgin soil
Ignoring refusal
Let the winter in
Indian Summer
Defiant forever
Let winter have its way

Through hollow insides
Made of branching halls
First step falls

Vanishing reasons
I chose this course
Death is in season
Inward to source
INITIATION
Vanishing reasons
I chose this course
DISINTEGRATION
Death is in Season
Step inside...
One thousand faces
Stare back from their fractured origin

In turn
Turn another corner
And lose my place
A blue print for disorder
The Way of Disarray

Backward glare
Burnished obsidian walls
Reflect the endings
That will never...

Unfold
Fold the corners over
To hold my place
The panic feels so familiar
In a breath-work maze

Clear the air
Ceremonial smoke rings
Fill the creases
Where the trauma collects

You better keep your thought forms clean
How we, the Conjured, seek
To breach the compass of this dream

Illumination
Elimination
Tangental slipstreams
Derail our train of thought
Stationed in fog
Composing
Decompositions
In constant revision
Infinite indecision
Encaged
Within a finite space

Help me hide it away
Under thin coats of cracking paint
Under smothering soundscapes
Where every layer I've made
Competes for a place

Enchanting parlor tricks
And slights of hand
Made me a god
Here in obscurity
Confined to making believe

So help me wish it away...
But how long
Yeah, how long
Before I'd beg to bring it back into life?
To bring it into the blue grey
The Grey matters
Matters of the Maker

Mark and Measure
Locus of control
Order, theorized
Crooked, our belief
In the straight line

Leave room for failure
One fatal mistake
That human touch
Planning its own obsolescence

The scent of senescence
Permeates

Our vast potential
Fated to fade
Our monuments
Willing its own expiration

Ground to powder
Chaos, improvised
Stolen fire
Blessed are the thieves
In these end times

Distill it down into a single line
Meet the demands of the mountainside
Compromise is such a loaded word
When landslides are singing

Hermetic melodies
Only we could hear
We clutch the chords
Forgotten anthems reappear

Encoded messages
Only we could speak
In native tongues
Ancient strains have gone to seed

Entangled crossroads
Only we could see
Beyond the fear
Our new creation will be gleaned

From the wastelands
Of the insincere
Winged beauty she looms
Inside a derelict cocoon

Inspiration strikes
Under flashing flood lights
Winged beauty emerge
To search this tortured world for new growth
Resurface, Recreate, and Redeem

Shades
Of night
Blossoming
Within

These Laced
Pathways
Of Hekate's
Garden

Retrace
Mind streams
Following
Her lead

Wellsprings
Whispering

The Rites of
INITIATION
I chose this course
DISINTEGRATION
Inward to source
PREVERBERATIONS
Follow the stations
Through branching halls
ANNIHILATION
Fever breaks my fall

Dionysus, good heavens
You've gone to pieces
In search of closure, you went within...
Everything and Nothing
Clashed
In counter movements,
Rotating spins-
A dream,
A dream
And nothing more.

Chart the startling curves
Of your dementia
(No way out)
Map the staggering depths
Of one dimension
(No way out)
Like clockwork witchcraft
One must suffer to pass
Suffer to Pass
Like clockwork witchcraft
My dreams now abandon me
Suffer To Pass

In time, you'll add my shadow
To your overspilling urn
And match my every move
Step for step, turn for turn

Reclaimed by a destiny I revoked
A trajectory, resigned
Writhing
In surrender
Storm clouds gather in this altered state

Hard-wired
To the recklessness of perception
Bathed in artificial light
Steeped in fabricated time
Storm clouds gather in this altered state

Ever-spinning,
The Great Wheel:
Void of progress.

Ever-Branching,
The Great Work:
Grieve the dying
Dying art
Art of process

Tunnel visions
Wander without aim
Through the Gauntlet.

Spirit Guides,
Forward Exits-
Disembodied nights
Shrouded in war paint;
Losing mind
To behold
The Other side