Iesu From Mattoroso

Place my white skull high above my City

So that I can forever see

Come all the cleansing desert nights

Come all the silent clarity

Let me look down upon all the swollen saviours

All the prophet flesh lined up along the dry roads

All the sweet crosses and failed resurrections

All the sun gods grinded to dust like bugs

I will have a legion other gods

Lead them forth into this world

Soak them up from the grit in the backyards

On to the streets of all our Babylon

I will succumb to your lukewarm Providence

Only after the desert has been paying its due

Only after the rain has stirred the Sleepers

And their voices will rise like a buzzing wonderous sea

I will throw myself in the Pit

And await your rain of stones

For I alone have seen the Truth

And hollered out the Name

And the Name has heeded me

And broken all the bonds

And Harlots will wake up by my bed

As my wounds will heal

As they dance in the smoke

Of inscense, hashish and myrrh

Oh Lord, if my hands have offended you

Oh Lord, if my hands have offended you

Then I'll cut them off

Just not today

Burn skin, burn away

Behind the veil

Filled with new life

When the rains come

I find my flesh feasted upon

'Till all is white and clean

Pearl white bone tools left in the wild

Scar tissue on the hands of thieves

This dove is just a rat with wings

This lion just a sack with maggots within

But I am your King

Oh I've come to be your righteous King

But I will be King

Oh I will be King

Why is my City a grave?

Why do the lepers I cure

Keep wearing their wounds with such pride?

Why is my City so hungry?

Why do the man-children starve

When I have shown them all there is to eat?

All my skin is peeling now

All the other lives

I nurtured with me

Are ready to fly

Pushing out through me

My blistered surface

To dry their pretty wings

In the sun and fly

Why does my City refuse

The Gospel I sung for seven years?

The marriage of man and locust, under my rule?

Why is my City so strange?

Filled with strangers and foreign blood?

Why do they mock their King

And why must I leave?

And walk with no skin between me and the desert

Walk with no skin between me and the Swarm

Bone to bone, marrow to marrow

Hollow soul to hollow soul

Spine to spine. Fever to fever

Broken shell to broken shell

Salt to salt. Hunger to hunger

Trembling flesh to tremling flesh

Walk with no skin into the Swarm

Walk with no skin into the Swarm