Various Martyrs:
’It is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr’
- Saint Augustine

When we believed
When we were certain
Set to ‘receive’ and ready to get poured in
All open arms and open hands
All encompassing visions of a promised land
They came and got us then
They came and got us then
When we believed

Saint John and Saint Stephen
Saint Peter Saint Michael
Various martyrs names
On our lips in the lion’s cage

And then we screamed
Laura was first in
Covered our ears as they tore off her limbs
We are a wave washing ashore
We dye the water red to the bottom of the ocean floor
We dye the water red
We dye the water red
And we believe

Saint John and Saint Stephen
Saint Peter Saint Michael
Various martyrs names
On our lips in the lion’s cage
Various martyrs names
Various martyrs names

The Children’s Crusade
”the history of a town is not that of its famous men only, but the story of the tenacity of its unknown fighters in the struggle for existence”
- Ellen Wilkinson ‘The Town That Was Murdered’

You can hear, oh hear us now
Just hold your ears inside your one cupped hand
We are waterless canals
To an arid promised land and how
Our trainers pound great circles out
And always will

All our bones
Are ears of corn under a plough
A billion enfeebled bodies pre-fertilised this ground
And with the cinders of their days
We’ll take the last flickers of flame
And forge an armour in the whitest white-hot disdain

That’s one more
One more one more
Fallen silent thud
That’s one more human floor tile
Face down in the mud
If my arms are up on a cross
I bet my eyes are upon my watch
There’s little else of consequence for men like us

We send the children off to war
They send the children back ignored
And in the ash our lives become
That’s how the coal gets won

Call of the Mild
”There is but one mode by which man can possess in perpetuity all the happiness which his nature is capable of enjoying — that is by the union and co-operation of all for the benefit of each.”
- Robert Owen, ‘The Social System’

We’ll build the new Jerusalem
We’ll build it on the bones of our old friends
We’ll build tall tall walls
We’ll build them high as any man could ever hope to crawl up
Like in the ark before the fall
Pure fortresses of hope

We’ll meet in secret to begin
Oh to be someone inside another life
With better timing
All the offerings we bring
But we never feel consoled

Or alive in our divinity
The virgin and eternity
We’re alive

We gave up our whole lives for it
Our whole lives
Our whole lives

We’re alive in our divinity
The virgin and eternity
We’re alive
And alone is what we are

Humanure
“I would rebel and die in twenty worlds sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life”
- George Elliot, ‘Armgart’

Hey if we never become
More than a hair in the razor’s lotion
More than a life dissolved
Like a cube of salt
In an ocean of the species
In our bastions of necessity
We’ll hammer our fists on the walls
With our skinny arms

Until we feel
All the things we’d like to feel but can’t feel
For want of the destruction of all hope

Indifferent universe
Measure me out a new hair shirt
Then charge me the tailor’s bill
While i’m sleeping in
A car full of hoods pulls up
Marches my dreams off, cuffed
And whips them again and again and again and again and again

Until we feel
All the things we’d like to feel but can’t feel
For want of the destruction of all hope

Getting over hope
Getting over hope