The Mass Of The Earth

(album: Prisoners - 2012)

I just wrote home to tell you this
I did just my very best
I went far but got stuck there
I picked up the pieces, I was your vigilante soldier
But the mass of the Earth just weighed too heavily on me

How can truth be opinion?
How can fact be right and wrong?
The familiar turned strange, good and evil unhinged
My utilitarian comfort unsettled
Consequentialist moral reasons categorically examined
Self-knowledge is a loss of innocence!

I heard your call to arms
Set off the doomsday alarm
But never heard back
So, I set out alone
I don't believe all I've been shown
A quest for truth and fact

I passed a desert town
Uninhabitable pastures of ash brown
Abandoned structures littered like an Aerstan scene
But then desperate people appeared
They had lived in constant drought for ten years
Ever since pollution got the best of them – wiped them clean
So, I thought "I'll take their curse away!
Let them flourish, I'll take the pain"
I lifted their drought and went on my way

So, I'm asking you, help me carry?
I'm Atlas, Jesus and Hades
Won't someone please take this weight off of me?
The destination is obsolete
The journey is bitter-sweet

Logic and consistency do not mix with morality
Justify the atrocities, the trump card never fails
Remove the greed and the ego, and the conscience prevails

No longer empty-handed
I stopped at the coast to rest
But found a flood of people drowning in a sea of hatred
They begged and pleaded
"End this war! Have acceptance and Peace restored!"
So, I drank up all their poison oaths

So, I'm asking you, help me carry?
I'm Atlas, Jesus and Hades
Won't someone please take this weight off of me?
The destination is obsolete
There's nothing left but wrong with me

Global systems all degrading
I'll take the problems so the World can breathe
And I have nowhere to take them
So, forever, they'll accompany me

The future is much longer than the past
I picked up wrongs along the way, removed them from the mass
But, I still had to jettison things to outrun gravity
And not wanting to further pollute I just left behind parts of me

I'm collecting your tradition, your religion, your depression
I'm trading in your affection to put us all to sleep

So, here I lay, bent shoulders, broken ribs
I sink into the Earth and all I can hope is
To take this baggage to the grave one more step
I cannot take by the time you read this
I'll have passed away