1. |
Ticks in the Summertime
02:26
|
|||
TICKS out in the heat
Done with retreat
Getting engorged
Feeding on you
Trapped out in their midst
Top of their list
Carted away
Buried beneath
See, see how they crawl
With all of their gall
Bleeding you dry
Until you’re dead
Goose step through this
Hollow hubris
Bring out gallows
Useless halos
Grinding machine
Authored fury
Wander out of the mist
Hedonic glottal abyss
Fire blaze with a hiss
Melting climbing again
|
||||
2. |
Forgotten Martyr
04:32
|
|||
JOHN BROWN drew a mighty saw
Into the flesh of mangled law
The blade was lodged in bone
Morphine dulled the righteous pain
The years moved on but nothing’s changed
He molders in his grave
Now law’s arm is back again
Strangling the life within
He is rotting, forgotten
He’s not plotting, forgotten
Memory fading
His name a footnote
Fading out
Into the void
Legacy to be destroyed
Work as hard as you can stomach
Then work harder: life long spent
Be a soldier, small business owner
A self starter: there it all went
Consecrated, never sated
Blood in water, chum your scent
Howl and holler, be a father
Be a martyr forgotten
Father of a failure plan
That's outgrowth is a tangled land
Breaking down the pearly gates
Shattering the dinner plates
Food for fodder in the slaughter
Trampling police blotters
Gathering the grains of structures
With hammers drawn the poultice ruptures
|
||||
3. |
Naufragia
04:27
|
|||
THE FLAG OF CONVENIENCE above rows of rusty containers
View in the morning: horizon line swallowed by red sky
Bad information, a system of accidents waiting
Out on the ocean, job insecurity in the wind
No one will ever know
Go where good sailors go
No one will ever know
Forced into service: no wages, no food, and no way out
A storm closing in now on a voyage doomed from the beginning
The cargo is shaking and still they must stick to the schedule
No one will ever know
Go where good sailors go
Down
Ships carrying and crewed by the kidnapped and press-ganged, names that we’ll never learn
Attribute it to the human element, that’s easy for some to say
Those who make the profits will wash their hands of suffering
And water eats the evidence, drowns responsibility
Attributed to the human element
It’s flooding below decks, the engine’s failed, soon there’s nothing but
Acceptable losses. Everywhere, every year, it’s just business.
No one will ever know
Go where good sailors go
Down
There's a seabird alighting upon an island of trash
There's a windowless room no one enters where the bankers boxes loom
Somewhere a bottle is smashed and a ship tumbles out
and money changes shadowy hands and it happens again
Bodies sink, merchandise floats
|
||||
4. |
Best Regards
03:50
|
|||
TYPING AWAY
My soul for pay
An office filet
Until I spin out
Hours drag on
The day remains
Misery cakes
With mundane icing
Water cooler
A place to stay
And waste the day
As my life drains out
This is built on ersatz ground all held up by hollow cogs
Printers make a screaming sound
Coffee churned into the ground
Clacking keys of misery
An hourglass with many holes is
Draining out as I grow old
With every minute I am told that
I could stand to work some more
But I don’t run a charity
To take my time you must pay me
Fill your cup with my best regards
Drink it up and leave me drained out
It needs done so finish it
Time is worth commodities
So have it on my desk by 5 and
Never ever feel alive
I’ll glue you to the telephone and
Follow you with a drone
You’ll never ever have the time your
Piece of mind is now a crime
So dry your eyes and close the door and
Never think of having more
My best regards to you
It’s time that I am through
|
||||
5. |
III. The Furies
05:48
|
|||
OUR SOLE DELIVERANCE in coal mark fingerprints
sealed up forever–all we have is the floor
Laws and consequence will grow as heaven sent
till field of accidents no plan can afford
River struck from stone colonial rages home.
Old seer shown none but your own face in the sword.
Death dreams deeper than our mines and questions reach:
in state, in corporate, and in why or wherefore.
Sow your seed against the day of recognition, turn the open grave, make peace with our lord
It's too late to be graded, it's too late to be helpless, for sake of the waste for the making of war
The course is set and sent
To Tartarus on our bent backs
Plotted, paid grace, the sky waits
Fury changing hands
Eumenides taming plan tracks through the
Forest laid waste and made safe
Time machine descends from the cloud to the ground
Cyborg steps out, says it’s already right now
But as they’re hopping back in, getting ready to bounce
We’re not convinced or decided
We say thou liest!
Centuries later a steamship heaves into view
Smokestacks all smoking and so are the crew
Passengers dancing under night sky darkest blue
And then the iceberg and the panic
It’s titanic!
I’m coming out of my blackout in the pouring rain
To stand and be judgèd before the chorus in shame
But I lost my glasses so can I truly be blamed
And may I be somewhat forgiven?
Oh it’s a living!
Terrible namelessness, gloved and assumed
Who’s behind us and who’s in pursuit
Pray spur onward, in flesh lives the boot-
heel. Who dances and who calls the tune?
Be reincarnate in carnival state
Sublimation wherein stay the age
Of chained Erinye’s children brought up on stage
In the future which we’ve entertained
Hello murder, hello forever, here I am in rising water
Numb eternal sleepless drive into the storm
|
||||
6. |
Mississippi Marxist
03:17
|
|||
POCKET DOCTOR had a daughter
Hearing missing isolation
Masticating Mississippi
Moving up to Sainted Louis
Seeing breathing lack of feeling
Pauper placement rotten dealing
Wealthy status built on stealing
Moving past it fosters healing
Growing into revelation
Battered unbent indignation
Condemnation ruptures her life
Mississippi made a Marxist
The crackdown
Bloomed without the war
Hiding
She went into a secret plot
Paranoid silencing
Lies sting
Truth will out for everything
Some things just take time and work
Some things just take work and time
|
||||
7. |
Broklahoma Bank & Trust
03:17
|
|||
WINDSWEPT HILLS awash with dust
Broklahoma bank and trust
Foreclosed on their empty hands
Breaking down the gates of legal plunder
Thompson guns were made to tear asunder
Greed and gluttony was their blunder
Now the downcast are the ones who run the show
Straw bosses are down
Huffed and puffed like clowns
Slandering around
Lamenting their fading
Landlords the real criminals
The real robbers are the ones who
Bleed the working until they’re dry
Sympathy lies with him
Dillinger a social escape man
Blood soaked hills awash with death
Starving wretched furied hands
Dug his way from out the sands
All he wants to be is a farmer
In his hands a gun and he’s a charmer
Reaching down through years he’s no one’s martyr
Dillinger’s a name with noble claims to fame
|
||||
8. |
At What Cost?
03:08
|
|||
WE NEED A STRAWMAN to move this along
Plucking the strings of our siren song
Radio Free is just doublespeak
We’ll slaughter a nation to wet our beak
When you hit a stymied channel
Your ship will run aground again
If you need to build a tunnel
We’ll fill it up with dynamite
If you try to fight against us
We’ll cry wolf to humanity
Building up a better world
Is not an easy task
Reading past the naked lies
Is a simple ask
Breaking crooked temples
Will tear off their mask
When you add up the cost
Of greed and vice
It’s less than the cost
Of the masses’ might
We live in a world
Choked in blight
We step on the lake
And crack the ice
Better worlds are struggling out now
Construction is sigogglin
Getting fed up with our platter
Dining out on suffering
Bringing forth the sword and plowshare
Will grind them into mulch and seed
|
||||
9. |
Quack
01:12
|
|||
???
|
||||
10. |
||||
I'M A CONSUMER!
I’m a market force
Superhuman
I’m a human resource
I’m regressing
To an earlier stage of development
I’m not bored or depressed anymore--kneeling before--
Receiving the sacrament
Think I’ll have a snack
I’m having a snack attack!
My reverie, a sampling spree
When every thing else is trampling me
It reverently handles me
And then it speaks! How can this be?
You thought you’d found affection
Solace in a sweetheart’s embrace
You realized it’s only your reflection
In the glasses on some smartass’s face
Have some of these molasses confections
Seek thou understanding
Or seek thou to pretend
Whence cometh thy candy
To spend perchance to vend
And do you really want to know?
Do you really need the answer?
Would you rather be
A hoity-toity Tootsie holy Roller
Or a Jolly Rancher?
There is a squealing scraping sound
As smoke rises from the furnace of my bowels
And the avenging angel from the height of the tower
Is coming down on my gummy burial mound
Fantasies at market rates, I’m eating
Candy in a cartelized state
|
||||
11. |
Dead Neighbor
02:58
|
|||
THE HOUSE was an empty box
Overgrown with heavy locks
Segmented from modern life
Divorced from human strife
Then one day a lonely soul
Made that house a home
Where she’d stay to rest
Tiny little nest
She was all by herself
Trying to survive
But she passed away
Hidden night and day
The landlord finally did
Lease the rooms for rent
But behind a door
Body starts to rot
This house is a graveyard plot
Locked doors will conceal the stench
But when the heat switches on
Tendrils of filth lay beyond
It is a shame to be so segmented
Who is to blame but our landscapes?
There is a flame that scorched our collective
It has a name; that’s cagèd blight
We all live in a graveyard
Foundations are built on bones
Be not afraid of coffins
Lingering on our conscience
Our cities are hollow blights
Our communion fades to night
These houses are lonely blocks
Segmenting our greater flock
|
||||
12. |
I. Danger in Numbers
02:35
|
|||
DANGER comes in numbers and
Changes to our lusts and
Labors - but we’re ready this time
Hey can you tell that I’m still
Shakin’? ‘Twas this very godfor-
Saken place with that unholy woman’s
Spells and familiar feline entwined
She said, "Satan, while you’re on va-
Cation deep in hell’s in-
Ferno, we pray for your return..."
Yes sir! That’s the woman,
Officer, you have to
Arrest her! She’ll try to fly on that broom, she should be
Sweepin’ away for ever
I’ll tell you what else she said:
There’s a lot more of them
Assistants and waitresses
Inside all our fortresses
You can’t be careful enough
See this is crucible stuff
Our maids and nurses are
Plotting to curse us all
Boil us in cauldrons
Then we’ll really be in
Double, double, toil and trouble
Skyscrapers reduced to rubble
Mighty beards cut down to stubble
And if the sword don’t work the club will
O my son and other sons, fair maids and loathsome daughter
You’ll remember me as witchfinder more than as your father
But I’ve not gone nowhere: I’m under your shoes and perched upon your shoulders
I’ll keep you here in the kingdom of murder forever, forever murder
|
||||
13. |
Overwintering
04:15
|
|||
SHELTERED within the snow
Given time to grow
The ticks are in the know
Blankets kept them warm
Sheltered from the storm
Until they could reform
Nectar trickled down a spout
Feeding them until they’re stout
Keeping up a falsehood face
Paperclipped and gaining space
Building rot is their plan
Resurrecting the strong man
Hanging by his feet
Audisio has won
Barrel of a gun
But rot is still replete
Coddled by the law
Whose blood they draw
Our flesh they gnaw
Sharpening their claw
Wintering away
Cozy places they can stay
|
||||
14. |
II. The Hunt
05:43
|
|||
THE SCENE'S pastoral, ere the set of sun
The very hour when the agents come
Alas, poor territory; do what needs done
And our production shall be begun
It’s not the killing or death-worship,
Not conquest or valor,
Civilized values, imperial capitals,
Technology, markets, nor labor
The project, in fact, is personal,
Secret, sweet, and intimate;
The very blood closest
To your heart--swim in it
What’s done is done now, what’s left defined
Following orders and marking time
The house lights go down, the curtain starts its rise
Just hit your marks and remember your lines
As the pilot to the villager
As the inquisitor to the heretic
As the settler to the native
As the soldier to the runaway
As the prison guard to the captive
Executioner to the witch
As the master to the child
As the hunter to the prey
Time’s warning has worn itself out
Even to its last recorded sound
And the forest lifted from the ground
The army sing together
A number of our occupation
It goes like: history
Has passed behind us
Heaven can be divided
And so it shall've been
Now will you join or be taken?
Equivocator, oh, if you must
Go ask the devil who dwells in the dust
There’s a ghost at the banquet, don’t raise a fuss
He just wants to thank you, the work’s done for us
It’s not the killing but the inflicting
Not the grave but the digging
And the paving over, the call to adventure
The road along which we’re endlessly driven
As the archetype to the other one
In aggregate a colony forms
You’ve been pointed out in the audience
They have come for you at last
The cast has took their final bow and as you go to wash your hands
Know ye now that dread inherit urge which is termed violence
Do as you like, do what you can, do it ‘til the hour of your death
Where the place? Upon the heath. There to meet with... MACBETH!
|
Swamp Athens, Georgia
Swamp is made possible by Hale Satan, Ohmw Home, Tammy Waggs, and viewers like you.
Streaming and Download help
Swamp recommends:
If you like Swamp, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp