Bardic Mechanism - The Downward Stroke Lyrics

The white-capped mushrooms grew in open sunlight
They grew in thickest grass near a misshapen tree
Forcing their way through detritus of former greenery
Their arrogant tenure painting man a fool
For treating expectation as unspoken rule
The rising castle walls
Under a gray and rainless sky
Besieged by city streets
There is no shelter in these halls
The gates are made of glass
And past the gates a metal plaque
A broken memory of that which came to pass
As if a shadow cast in daytime
Can keep the coming night from turning black
A powder coarse
Of sugar, sulfur, nitrocellulose
Was meant to detonate
Yet it did not of course
There is no hiding from the crowds
Beneath these faceless autumn clouds
The winds of autumn expectations blow them to and fro
The packs upon their shoulders hunch each aging prisoner
Keeping their faces turned to childish things
Only their haggard hair and musky summer smells betray
Adulthood barely kept at bay
Metallic birds of paradise
Eviscerate Prometheus
Probing his liver and his intestines
With beaks that twist and rend
Then like a phoenix do they cauterize
And in a dance recalling its integrity
Prometheus' body do they mend
Guiding his flesh to heal the wound
Until Prometheus is whole again
Yet, do they leave him shackled still
A sacrifice to keep alight the fires of men
Defiant of the setting sun
Dying fluorescent lights adorn
The gas stop on the hill
Across the broken overpass
It barely beckons still
To travelling throngs long gone
At night I saw the highway's banking turn
Still rising from the dirt and dust
An oxbow lake of asphalt
With one last stand of equidistant metal poles
Reflecting moonlight
The solitary ghostly headlight
Of vehicles long turned to rust
A devil turns the wheel of fortune
Its turning breaks all things
All creeds and lands and kings
As fresh-faced aspirants
With fresh-spilled blood upon their hands
Hold on to rise to their own zenith
Then fall in turn as if a shooting star
To face their own blind reckonings