Hexis
When every day just rips the stitches
And you're running out of spoons
The warden's thrown that switch and
You know the trolley's coming soon
You're on a streetcar named disaster
Trading hands with Jacques Lacan
You couldn't reach Gehenna faster
If you were shipped by Amazon
CHORUS
Axis mundi, or mundane existence
You're just as dusty either way
But there's one truth, beyond all resistance
We're sortin' order from decay
We are both order and decay
Now the woods are full of orphans
And your head is full of ghosts
As you survey from the Waste Lands
Those years of childhood trauma, undiagnosed
We all pursue the things that please us
Until we learn that life is pain
And in that moment when we come to exegesis
We start the loop again
CHORUS
On good days you feel you're walking
Through some Disney fairytale
But that's just the benzos talking
Cuz you know you're born to fail
It's just textbook self-hypnosis
By folx who want to believe
That when I look out at the cosmos
Something's looking back at me
CHORUS
Light At The End
When you're whistling past the graveyard
Hear bones singing in the dark
Don't you ever start to wonder
If this whole world's jumped the shark
In the valley of the shadow
Halfway to Halloween
We've been sold a tale of failure
And regression to the mean
It's a dream of angel armies
Descending from the sky
They will come to end the madness
Time for everyone to die
CHORUS
No more foregone Armageddon
No half-buried Liberty
No more third-act desperation
No descent to sunless sea
That's the way we used to do it
Ain't the way it goes today
Put on your ruby slippers
Cuz the future's on its way
Well we heard that Blood's a Rover
Saw the shape of Things to Come
Felt despair on that Day After
Watching Pickens ride the bomb
Now we're walking toward the future
Learning how to do no harm
Turn our back on hollow nightmares
And await our final form
Act in the living present
Like that old dead poet said
Don't you follow alt-White Rabbits
And take the time to feed your head
CHORUS
We used to cringe at heat death
Genuflect to entropy
But now it seems that time's becoming
Is emergent complexity
We ride Laniakea
Tracing faces on the flow
Wedged between the void and plenum
As above, so below
We watch the Light from the beginning
Or perhaps it is the end
We're in a tunnel of love
On a journey to transcend
CHORUS
Lost In Translation
We're livin in a cave
Watching shadows in projection
Like laboratory rats
And Penfield's hacked all our connections
Nothing is for certain
It's all interpreted sensation
Any effort at ontology
Is lost in translation
Well we don't know what comprises
Most of the universe's matter
But we might not see the answer
If it was served up on a platter
Things get weird in the regime of
Bose-Einstein condensation
Our notions of what is, are
Lost in translation
Fish aren't aware of water
Nor humans of perception
Any time we say we know
Is an act of self deception
There's no way outside of
Our egocentric situation
Our phenomenology
Is lost in translation
BRIDGE
Well we've been down this road before
And we've studied all the rules
We see the charlatans and quacks
Treating us like fools
The answers don't come easy
When they come at all
But the royal road to knowledge
Won't be stopped by any wall
The Fox is in the henhouse
The fools are on the Hill
There's Russians in our Facebook
Waving hundred dollar bills
And the mango Mussolini
Twitters out his fabrications
The promise of America
Lost in Translation
Well I went to ask the Bishop
For a couple words of wisdom
But they'd put him in the big house
For abusing little children
All our former moral centers
Vanished to evaporation
The core institutions of our culture
Lost in translation
The acolytes of Heston
Demand their guns be buttered
So the schools are all installing
Heavy metal roll-down shutters
All moderate positions
Branded as capitulation
Any middle ground at all
Lost in translation
Veterans living on the street
And children locked in cages
Walkin wounded in the cubicles
Of Kübler-Ross's stages
And we have no response
That is not mute capitulation
The children of the Sixties
Lost in Translation
BRIDGE
Anti-vaxxers on the left
Climate deniers on the right
And a botnet in the middle
Looking for a fight
You got college prices going up
And wages trending down
We all are Number 6 now
And the circus is in town
There aren't easy answers
But the question's still worth asking
Though it's hard to pay attention
And we suck at multi-tasking
We are easily distracted
By random information...
Ooh, hey, look, a squirrel!
Lost in Translation
It's a Prisoner's dilemma
It's a comic book adventure
And we stumble down on the sidewalk
Picking brains out of our dentures
We've been sold light anesthetic
When what we need is deep sedation
We're zombies on the half-shell
Lost in Translation
We've amused ourselves to death
Squeezing reason through a funnel
We precessed our simulacra
In a Disney-themed dark tunnel
We are nomads on the rhizome
Après nou, le conflagration
All of Western culture
Lost in translation
We're the children of the batfrog
We're the secret heart of fandom
We dream the dreaming dreamers
And we harmonize at random
We all need to put our shoulders
To the boulder of imagination
Before the power of our music is
Lost in translation
Music Is The Universal Language
Music is the universal language
How it started, we don't know
From the drip of rain on stone
Down through drums of hide and bone
To an oceanic trancelike state of flow
(Spoken) Here's the whiparound...
Muziko estas la universala lingvo (Esperanto)
In omni ore, cantus potens (Latin: a mighty song in every mouth)
Aus dem Rhythmus des Herz (German: from the rhythm of the heart)
Zu den Worten, die heilen Schmerz (German: to the words that heal the pain)
Il traduit les émotions et sons (French: it translates emotion into sound)
(Spoken) How about some science?
Music is the universal language
After Babel, entre nous
Yeah we know Noam Chomsky's wrong
But we can still connect through song
With a structure all our brains are wired to
(Spoken) We can't forget the conlangs...
Music is the universal language
It's crimethink in a world that lives on fear (Newspeak)
Che hoyas che drivos (Dothraki: Sing or die)
Krif fin suleyk do fin lo (Skyrim Dragon: Fight the power of the lies)
Karna lindale tanya gala seere (Elvish: Make music that celebrates peace)
(Spoken) Just for shiggles, how about one in Akkadian...
Gilgamesh sutur eli sarri (Gilgamesh surpassing all other kings)
Sa naqbu imuru (He who saw the Void)
Mu la magri (He was unsubmissive)
Ilati (To the Goddess)
Adi la basi alaku (He was brought to death)
Music is the universal language
But the 12th root of 2? Suka blyod (Russian: [expletive])
Traduttore, traditore (Italian: The translator is a traitor)
When the words must tell the story
Credo melodiam potissimum aliud (Latin: Believe melody above all else)
(Spoken) Can the Klingons bring it home?
Music is the universal language...
(Spoken)
Qo' tlhInganpu' bom. HoH tlhInganpu' nuvpu' 'Iv bom.
(Klingon: Klingons do not sing. They kill the people who sing.)