Tragic Kingdom

(album: Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder - 2008)

Here sat Babylon
Fattened by the purses of the worst and wrong
Where the decadent tastes of Hell grew strong
Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

Dusk descended like a final curtain
On this stage only death was certain
Singing through the turrets
Like a velvet serenade

Played near a grave

Sentries and gentry, afforded the bloom
Of a red setting sun and a bloodletting moon
Applauded, then accorded them
Portents of doom

Almost too soon...

They pissed upon the winds
That rocked the cradles
Laughing over those hovels grovelling to wolves
They kissed and sinned
Under overstocked tables
As the world outside grew sodden and mauled

Here sat Babylon
Fattened by the purses of the worst and wrong
Where the decadent tastes of Hell grew strong
Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

Gilles sat sipping damson absinthe
From a goblet made of bone
As lightning ripped and danced upon
The flagstones
Wayward fantasies marched on home

Now the treetops bowed to whisper
In a thin Disney veneer
They knew the howls so exquisitely honed
Were those of children, disappeared

They'd listened to the winds
Heard the murdered Abel
Re-christened in the stone jaws of Tiffauges

Where the list of sins
Grew beyond a fable
They now roared abroad, restless with debauch

Restless with debauch

Restless with debauch
This tragic kingdom
Would see God's angels walk
Away...

Satanic, enigmatic
His black magic was ecstatic
Megalomaniac in titanic displays
Dressed in the best
Wicked britches of the West
He cut a mourning figure in glorious swathe

But all his nightmares would come true
Drowning in a stream of unbounded pleasure

Here sat Babylon
Fattened by the purses of the worst and wrong
Where the decadent tastes of Hell grew strong
Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

The moon bleared through the skeletal trees
Averting her face from congenital deeds

Thus eves grew murky, haunted, grieved
About this place laced with demon seed

Blanchet, a priest, his book of lies
Exonerated him from Gilles' crimes
Announced his fears, one night of sighs
A night for cursing nursery rhymes
In the light of the fire wrestling feckless shadows

(The track gets blacker for this tragic kingdom)

Gilles' frightening wealth, his tightening grip
On the weak and the rubies that his coffers let slip
Steered to near ruin in successive years
Of the most of excess and the best of it here
In the light of the fire wrestling reckless shadows