Ii (penance) Lyrics - Fen

Time 

That humiliating arbitrary adjudicator 

Your cruelty builds in an endless cycle of decrepitude 

Skin slackens with each passing seconds 

Flesh weakens and softens 

Bones stiffen in agony 

Dreams dissolve 

Hopes slough 

A blackened pulp of deepest despair 

A mind enfeebled and afraid 

Gazes back upon a path of waste and regret 

Gazes ahead only to t he cold and the empty 

All will fall 

All will fail 

All will fall 

All will fail 

And so with each heavy, broken-backed step I inch closer to my reckoning 

Sinews stiff, sloughing, sagging 

Resonating with slow decay like catgut strings 

Draped across a stave of rotting timber 

The cathedral looms... Tearing, oppressive, stentorian 

Cries once echoed in the chapels of cold stone 

Where cowled figures dripped with feverish piety 

And candles of reverence flickered in the torpid darkness of unanswered prayers 

Stoic monolith that bleeds black redemption 

Onyx shroud shed like skin 

Penance driven into the maw of the soil 

Stygian crust that chokes on the carcasses of the forgotten 

There is no room here 

Suffocation... Rejection... 

A hopeless soul slithers in vapid vestibules 

Echoes 

Silhouettes 

Fading notions of what once breathed false proclamations 

Granite shaped by the echoes of supplication 

Myriad visages gaze in judgement 

A solemn phalanx stands as one 

One singular totem of accusation 

Choral, somnolent striking the marrow 

Of a soul laced with corrosive regret 

Guilty - Pathetic - Cringing 

Crushed by stone 

Withering within the inquisition cloisters 

The last shreds of waning hope thus scatter 

I cannot see what lurks within these sepulchral shadows 

Emanating whispers of a thousand past condemnations 

One thousand past condemnations! 

Freezing hands reach - coiling, cloying 

My name is but dust 

And I flee again