The Jester's Dance
In Flames
Jester Race (2002)

Stood there leaning to the city moon,
casting silhouettes tall to grip her white rooms
the black-clad voyeur in his black-clad masque
in the serpentine sun of tragedy basked

Stood there cursing at the soul-dead mass
with their fabled illusions, the vain dreams that passed
splinters of a life rushing by in the whirl
alone, silent warrior in a fantasy world

He cried for night / but night could not come
so, swept in the shroud of misanthropia he went away
and fed the empty galleries
with the artifacts of the black rain
sunken into the shadows with a dry, sardonic smile

He made the footprints a part of his heart
to rouse a sacred confrontation

Stood there carving on the monument to lies
digging of the Earth, making friends with the soil
as the all-mother rises and bares her bleeding thighs
he disappears into her cold, icy womb