Oh, to brave the journey that it takes
To make something of this yearning
Taking chances, facing risks
At times we see what it's left on our wrists
And only see the depths of what we've lost
To carry faith in what this journey makes
Is far too grim with our heads a-turning
Sensing bats and vultures on our tracks
Fear and hope they want to lick up what we've etched
The velvet drippings of our wrist, the flow of sorrow
We leave behind
And so it goes, a day again
A battered journey left to mend
A failed experiment of mourned decay
Her soft whimper planted in the past
Where it's damned to stay
And her songs of sorrow echo through our choices
How to mend what's imprisoned in time
But who's wound cries out through the motions we make?
I sense it's been long infected, my passion and pride
Though this thing in my chest, I can only call 'faith'
Keeps churning, so I pursue again
Another symbol appears on my wrist, inscribed
And from it, I sense her velvet cry
A river who's bounty runs backwards
For us it only offers grief
For it is loss itself, what we've bled from our carving of meaning
It can only ever lead us back to what once was
Who we once were
But her ever elusive likeness remains
In the one direction we can never traverse
So it is our carving away pushes us ever forward
To think that every choice
Carries its burden of loss
Illuminates the absurdity of faith
That what we believe in is what we've lost
Our acts of creation crucify
The things we mean to manifest
The sorrow that spilled from our worshipping hand
Creates in the distance a promising land
One that we've killed before we knew it existed
One that could only erect from the void in our wrists
When the tears reclaim life in the velvet flow
For a moment, we sense that we've been there
Next to her likeness outside of time
Where she drinks of our loss
And gives not a trace of response but a paralyzing hum
Where flesh has broke down to naught but a pulse
And for this brief dream, we are there with the world that we've mourned
A flow of sorrow, pushing through and behind
It runs from all things that we've carved and believed
A bleeding of velvet, a crying of loss
Must we kill the the things we immortalize?
As we carve our symbols, we carve empty space
And the realm of non-being becomes more real
Than the things with which we discover them
It's an absurd thing, that our journey of faith
Should open up this vacuum in space
But we move and bleed on, and the flow of sorrow
Pushes us into the ever-present
As we mourn and amend the velvet scar
It grows ever deeper
And we both stray and return
'Til we are one with that weeping lady
That we should flow just as her velvet cloak
