+ I NEVER KNEW

I never knew
How dead inside I was
Til I met you
And you fucked me up with love

I never knew
The feeling of reeling
These weeping wounds
Are finally healing

When singers sang
Their songs of pure devotion
Their words just rang
Of pantomime emotion

But now I hear
Their secret meaning
I’m filled with fear
On a cliff and leaning

+ NEW WORLD BORDERS (feat. DAM)

If the enemy of your enemy is your friend
Then brother I’m the best friend you ever had
If all these headless bodies mean a thing
It’s me motherfucker it’s ME

The heat you spit won’t set the world on fire
But baby it could sentence me to die
If there’s meaning in these shattered walls
It’s me motherfucker it’s ME

Hey!
Clear the way
Hey!
This mess you made
Hey!
We’re coming home to roost

Hey!
I ain’t ask for this
Hey!
It’s your own hubris
Hey!
That put me in this noose

On these seas that cradled Argonauts
We’ve made our very own Atlantic Passage
What’s the point of your ships massed in those gulfs?
It’s me motherfucker, it’s ME

I’m the price of all of your goddamn lies
I never asked for you to save my life
If your children died for any goddamn reason
It’s me motherfucker, it’s ME

Hey!
Clear the way
Hey!
This mess you made
Hey!
We’re coming home to roost

Hey!
I ain’t ask for this
Hey!
It’s your own hubris
Hey!
That put me in this noose

Cast me away from my village from my homeland
You burn my town, you Burn my oil, I turn for help you Turn me down
Cast me in as the villain in “Homeland"
You burn my town, you Burn my oil, I turn for help you Turn me down

Ama turn my volume up drumming on “Darbukas"
You should get your troops out, So i can get my truth la?
I'll Think it, I'll Bring it, I’ll Sing it, I'll Spring it
I'll play my 3arab strings without you sticking any fingers

But no, you had to bite it, copyright it
Before your cold invasion i didn’t know what Ice-Is (ISIS)
Your Tsunami waves got me floating on your shores
So open up your doors, Heal Yeah - I'm Invited

+ ALL THE WAY ALIVE

Man it’s been a fucked up summer
Bodies piling up in the streets
Christ it’s just been one long bummer
The vultures got plenty to eat

The heat just keeps on pounding
It won’t stop ‘til it draws blood
When you hear those sirens sounding
Then the gate’s giving way to the flood

That’s how they know
You're
All The Way Alive
Let them die

Your body’s just another war zone
Ideology projects on your flesh
The battles rage from hormone to hormone
They won’t stop ’til they’ve stolen yr breath

That’s how they know
You're
All The Way Alive

You were born with your neck in a noose
Get out in the street baby shake it loose
When the heat starts to fuck with you
Tell em'
We got the numbers and we got the truth

You're
All The Way Alive
Let them die

+ Years of Lead (Are Back Again)

A laugh at your sick joke
Is enough to get us both choked
Since when?

A strategy of tension
May be worth a mention
Again

Apocalyptic fury
Dispensed with the jury
Surprise!

But calculated hatred
Awoken like the undead
Will rise

They’re bound to say it’s different this time
It’s still men with guns and big ideas
One man’s hell is another’s paradise
And both are fates that we should fear

Wait 'til the smoke clears
It’s worse than your worst fears
Trust me

You know it’s gonna backfire
We’re due for a quagmire
You’ll see

All your points of reference
Won’t help you mount your defense
This time

They speak a different language
The language of anguish
Pantomimed

You really think we want the same thing?
You underestimate the other side
You talk of freedom but don’t realize
How bad some people want to die

You really think you’ll find utopia
Somewhere outside your fevered mind
Your workers’ paradise or their jannah
Your bullets won’t bring them to life

+ SISYPHUS OF THE NEGEV

To make way for a forest
We’ll rip up your trees
To give you life
We need to see you bleed

As soon as it stands
We’re here to tear it down
We’ll bury your village
Grind it into the ground

Then out of the rubble
You’ll just build it again
Til our bulldozers rumble
And turn it back into sand

We’ll circle your graveyard
Once we’ve pummeled the rest
Pitch your tents over corpses
To us it’s a test

We’ll find a way just like always
To crush what you’ve made
And you’ll rebuild from the wreckage
While we sharpen the blade

We can keep doing this
Til one of us blinks
And your eyelids are weaker
when you live on the brink

It’s our birthright, our privilege
From above handed down
Plus it’s for your own good
You’ll love your new town

This land is our land
This land is our land
This land is our land
This land is our land

+ THE GREY CARDINAL

“Spare this lizard crawling towards you, treacherous boy/It wants to die between your fingers” – Martial

“Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision
Then burn down the house to fulfill the prediction” – Milosz

You set fire to your own house
Out like a lizard but in like a mouse

You can’t tame the beast, the beast tames you
In the Cardinal’s America, the swamp drains you

Everywhere’s an end, and everywhere’s a middle
The means to an end: an unsolvable riddle

You traffic in the diction of gangster fiction
Your boilerplate reads: perpetual friction

‘Every God is a God of death’
We draw them closer with every breath

Your papa’s a monster, his passerine too
but “everything which burns is not consumed”

Hellfire won’t manage to turn them to ash
They nest in volcanoes, in mountains of cash

‘Every God is a God of death’
We draw them closer with every breath

(Why take care of the past
When the past couldn’t take care of you?)

Waiting for a Reischtag fire
A new world born out of a funeral pyre

Bathe in the blood or incandesce
Your soul or your body must experience death

‘Every God is a God of death’
We draw them closer with every breath

+ QUEEN OF PROOFS (feat. JAMMZ)

If memory serves, it was you struck that nerve
But who does it serve if it can’t be preserved?

Like looking through gauze, the feeling just gnaws
Still you’re trapped in its jaws, that insatiable maw

Your own two eyes are filled with lies
and all you trust just turns to dust

On a rickety throne the Queen of Proofs sits alone
Long since deposed
In threadbare robes

‘It’s just as clear as if he were here’
It’s clear as rust, and thick as gust
With her last breath she’ll spell your death

+ FORBIDDING FORBIDDING

You can’t see the giants for the knees
This forest’s all trunks no trees
Still living in the 20th century
Still fighting all those long-dead enemies

So the man ain’t exactly who we thought he was
We’re dealing with a new type of fuzz
They won where the company failed
We signed off while they built a better jail

Just take a look where your noble work has gotten ya
Since you winked while you slapped on a swastika
Turns out not everybody laughed
Yr still the life of the Party isn’t that a gas

Just relax knowing nothing means anything
Kick back while the earnest bitches hand-wring
People dying in the street needn’t bother you
You’re initiated into a higher truth

It’s a breeze to say ‘fuck it’ when your belly’s full
Your white dick got you feeling like you’re on a roll
When you sputter it just makes you fucking crazy
Bred to think that you’ll win by being lazy

+ ANGKAR

They fuck you up, your king and country

Angkar kills but does not explain
And once it starts, it cannot be restrained
The fields pile up with the maimed and the slain
They were coddled and murdered in a familiar refrain

First things first you infantilize
You breed a need, give a watchful eye
Fence in the flock keep the pigs in the sty
Now they’re close enough to slaughter if they step out of line

Angkar kills but does not explain
We’ll rain fire on your children if they get in the way
Then redact and deny in classified dossiers
But with a coy little wink we give the game away

No need to justify what never took place
It’s remote control murder you never saw his face
They bury their dead and so begins the race
As ten other men rise up to take his place

Angkar kills but does not explain
You’re next in line if you refuse to be trained
Death by protectorate, you’re consumed by the flames
Of liberty or justice; the result is the same

For liberty or justice: the result is the same

+ OF TWO MINDS

Let go
You never had a choice, though
This script was written long ago
By men you’ll never know

Say no
As if you had a say, oh
Your path was laid out long ago
Just when you’ll never know

Bicameral Chimera, a goat whispering in a lion’s ear
Devils counsel kings while snakes take up the rear
All your fears are manifest
In this festival, there are many left
Yet to take the stage
Each act a facet of your rage
Each willowy singer a bar in your cage

Devils counsel kings while cobras prime their venom
Boy, you got yourself a lemon
Boy, you shoulda checked under the hood and seen for yourself it’s no good
This is your birthright: to fail to understand
Religion asserts itself in a dance between cortices
Faith is electricity
The mind’s ear is what I fear
(hear hear)

Let go
You never had a choice, though
This script was written long ago
By men you’ll never know

Two chambers, both alike in degradation, symbiotic, psychotic;
Two nations, hemispheres of abject fear
Rejecting entreaties to be treated with dignity
Say his name
Say her name
Until we put a name to it we can’t say a thing
Devils counsel kings and we live in the dying scrub
The burning bush
The desiccated plains
The wasted, worn out world
The snakes slither over scraps and shit on the shrubs
Show me a higher mind
I’ll show you a monkey pissing in its own mouth
It is up to
I and I
I and I
Or am I
It’s just me
Nobody else in the world far as I can see

Say no
You never had a say, oh
Your path was laid out long ago
Just when you’ll never know

+ Bush Mama Blues

The bulls poke their horns in the hive
Just to hear the buzzing
They live just to see you writhe
This city’s being muzzled

It’s a slow motion ethnic cleanse
Clean out the gutter
Keep the lines red and the rubbish in bins
Now everything’s the right color

Make sure they’ve cleared a route
That they’re free to roam
They turned a prison inside out
And they call it home

Suburban Sykeses and Picots
Tyro-Cartography
Blood-full-belly mosquitos
The Haussmanns of the beach

Every time you raise your fist
The ceiling just gets lower
As soon as you need something fixed
The system just gets slower

They just won the racial raffle
Petty colonizers
Still have the nerve to be baffled
When the rabble rises

Don’t dare call it an uprising
The Man’s gonna call it a riot
No one else finds it surprising
When the kids set this shit on fire

Every time you raise your fist
The ceiling just gets lower
The sooner you need something fixed
The system just moves slower

Hey!
Behind the gate
All locked away
See what you did

Hey!
Don’t turn away
Look what you made
These are your kids

+ ST. SERAPHIM REDUX

Well you’ve run out of time
And the house is on fire
You can’t say it’s all right
As the flames lick your thighs

Babylon Shaped my mind
I became what I despise
I resolved to purify
Filed my teeth back in the wild

There’s no God to show mercy on you
That’s what I was put here to do
You built your world out of thatch
Gave me the wood and the match

Sealed away from prying eyes
I dispensed with my disguise
Left the city, left Sarov
My icon is a bomb

There’s no God to show mercy on you
That’s what I was put here to do
You built your world out of thatch
Gave me the wood and the match

Ahura Mazda has risen again
We have only a Phoenix to gain
Once this world is devoured in flames
Only then will you know my true name

+ THE BLUE AND THE BLACK

Show me your eyes, show me show me your eyes
Look in my eyes, look in look in my eyes
Ain’t nothing left for you to hide behind
look in my eyes, show me show me your eyes

There’s only one difference ‘tween you an me
Every single card I’m holding you can see
I never gave you this authority
I don’t recognize your power, see?

After decades of plunder, sanctioned by law
What’s to stop you from murder when you know you’ll just walk?
If this is order then you answer to a different God
Sewing chaos then pretending that it’s yours to solve

If you steal from sleeping beasts
You best hope they stay asleep

Show me your eyes, show me show me your eyes
Look in my eyes, look in look in my eyes
Ain’t nothing left for you to hide behind
look in my eyes, show me show me your eyes

There’s only one difference ‘tween you an me
Every single card I’m holding you can see
I never gave you the authority
I don’t recognize your power, see?

He who will punish will be punished in turn
You laid the foundation for cities to burn
If this is justice then you answer to a lower law
If this is peace then you’ve opened up the door for war

If you steal from sleeping beasts
You best hope they stay asleep
But the winter’s over now
We’re wide awake, and won’t be cowed

Show me your eyes, show me show me your eyes
Look in my eyes, look in look in my eyes
Ain’t nothing left for you to hide behind
look in my eyes, show me show me your eyes

+ KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN

Kill the Indian, Save the man

The blood quantum
Don’t make the man

From moral slums
You’ll crawl then stand

You try, you fail
You squirm, you flail

You whine, you scream
Then you lose steam

Kill the Indian, save the man
Once you submit
You must admit
We pulled you up
To dwell among us

They always
Come around

It works this way:
You’re lost then found

Re-education
Is Liberation

From this prison
You were raised in

Kill the Indian, save the man
In these temples
We lead by example
You’ll shed your old skin
And emerge human

+ The Resort Beyond the Last Resort

You're prized in your circle for old-fashioned ways
We can't see the ceiling; your boot's in the way

The Twentieth Century ran by your rules
The Twenty-First looks like it might follow suit

You just itch to get the job done
You're expedient and foolish too
Kill and a man and claim the war's won
Back in the shadows where we can't see you

You wither in the open
You shrivel in the sun
To you negotiation
Is the barrel of a gun

Left with a choice between reason and rhyme
You've made it clear you'll choose rhyme every time

You know what they say about history and farce
But your tragedies were a farce from the start

You stumble into situations
You couldn't recognize the right track
Your shortsightedness is stunning
Always a step behind the blowback

You wither in the open
You shrivel in the sun
To you negotiation
Is the barrel of a gun

+ Straight World Problems

Who’s gonna save you now?
Now all of your gods are dead?
Who’s gonna save you now?
When it’s off with your master’s head?

You were thrilled to see them go
Now it’s you who’s in control

But who’s gonna heed you here?
You didn’t think that far
So who’s gonna steer you clear?
When you’re the one driving the car

You operate outside the ring
Wake up to find you’ve been roped in
So who’s gonna save you now?

A new era
Is upon us
So why’s it feel just
Like the straight world?
The past ain’t past, man
It’s there to taunt us
It’s there to haunt us
From the straight world

You cradled this young epoch
Swaddled in lamb’s clothing
You told yourselves there was no top
One even plane for all men

There’s no way to win this fight
Success guarantees your loss
As soon as the end’s in sight
The new boss becomes the old boss

You were thrilled to see him go
Now it’s you who’s in control
Who’s gonna save you now?

A new era
Is upon us
So why’s it feel just
Like the straight world?
The past ain’t past man
It’s there to taunt us
It’s there to haunt us
From the straight world

You set yourself apart from the start
You were never gonna be like the men you hate
You got yourself a feel for the part
Now you’re hanging heads from the city gates

A new era
Is upon us
So why’s it feel just
Like the straight world?
The past ain’t past man
It’s there to taunt us
It’s there to haunt us
From the straight world

+ THE CAT LOOKS AT THE KING

A man stares down a tank
And the cat looks at the king
An officer breaks rank
And the cat looks at the king

Motionless in Taksim Square
The cat looks at the king
While Europe burned,
in the Cabaret Voltaire
The cat looked at the king

Black and red in Catalonia
The cat looked at the king
For a moment in Makhnovia
The cat looked at the king

Behind the makeshift barricades
The cat looks at the king
The corsairs and the renegades
Those cats looked at the king

In Rojava, in the midst of hell
The cat looks at the king
Some cats they just won’t be compelled
The cat looks at the king

Easter rebels reject the crown
The cat looks at the king
Sendic going underground
The Cat looked at the king

On the riverbank at Stono
The cat looked at the king
Sick of pigs at Stonewall
The cat looked at the king

+ Common Cause

You make common cause with kamikazes
To you everyone’s a fascist but the actual Nazis
Seduced by your enemy’s enemy
You reduced the world to simple binary

Look who’s marching next to you
They got blood on their hands, man, blood on their shoes
They might be on the right side today,
But blood is blood and not fade away

You make common cause with kamikazes
You call everyone a fascist but the actual Nazis
Seduced by your enemy’s enemy
You reduced the world to simple binary

They used your speech, man, they learned your moves
But they don’t want the same things you do
They’ll use you, man, in the name of love
But they’d have you dead push come to shove

You parsed the issues, picked your sides
Assaulted reaction, laid waste to bromides
Lured by a cheap solidarity
You examine, man, but you forgot to see

You make common cause with kamikazes
To you everyone’s a fascist but the actual Nazis
Seduced by your enemy’s enemy
You reduced the world to simple binary

+ Tired Blood

Life ain’t fair
But it should be.
‘You can’t touch
What you can’t see’

So we’re told;
But ask the blind.
We’re all grasping
In the night.

Tired blood
Tired blood
Blood... blood

+ Deep State

The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
You barely have to squint to see it
The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
You hardly have to squint to see it

We’re both looking at the same damn thing
You see a kingmaker, I see a king
You see a board room, I see a chess board
They’ll protect the royal court
under threat of the sword

A missed encounter with the real
Them towers falling didn’t change the deal
They just pulled the fuckin’ curtain back
Now they act more brazen with a lot less tact

The power’s in contracts, it ain’t in Congress
CSPAN is theater, man, no more, no less
On everything important there’s broad consensus
From the hacks to the pols
to the bosses they can sense us

Getting restless, but man they couldn’t care less
We’re screaming in a vacuum: ‘transparency and fairness’
They tell us they’re with us, their condescension’s regal
No conspiracy their hegemony is legal

And that’s the fucking thing that keeps me up at night
Power builds a force field, hides in plain sight
The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
And to these motherfuckers man your life is cheap

The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
You barely have to squint to see it
The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
You hardly have to squint to see it

From the motherfucking beltway to Silicon Valley
From Langley to Bluffdale, Wall Street to Raleigh
Data analytics, high frequency trades
Financialization, privatized highways

Sacrifice zones left to wither on the vine
While shareholder pockets just keep getting lined
A minor offense: disenfranchisement
While monumental theft
gets you a slap on the wrist

Internal colonies just swept to the side
While urban Babylon grows higher and higher

For generations the injustice piled on
Redlines, white mobs, black blood smiled upon
The GI bill, the new middle class
And swaths of black veterans left out on their ass

Coercion automated, the illusion of choice
Locked into systems in which we have no voice
Fodder for ad-men, grist for the mill
We’re all willing dupes at the mercy of shills

The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
You barely have to squint to see it
The deep state, man, it ain’t even deep
You hardly have to squint to see it

+ Metaphysical Cops

For David Kato

From Lake Forest pulpits
To the Dark Continent
They’re speaking of culprits
Of will and intent

My love makes me holy
With this laying of hands
My desire turns slowly
To a prayer for this land

Your theology crumbles
For it’s God we appease
You know you can’t stumble
When you’re down on your knees

Your law and your justice
Are ordained in your mind
You don’t know what lust is
It’s a law more refined

They fear to go to sleep for they fear bad dreams

If you’re losing it here
Take the fight overseas
With a new ship to steer
And a new flock to feed

‘Human rights’: a tautology
It stinks like a corpse
It’s the stench of the colony
And it’s come back in force

There’s sin in their semen
This laying of hands
Casts out the demons
In a prayer for this land

Our sex makes us humble
My God, we’re eager to please
You know you can’t stumble
When you’re down on your knees