Blighter

Desert

Air on skin,
  the chill of empty space, the
Nomad's grin,
  the sand, the wave and the
Cold
  will drive them back
In,
  will keep them close to him. And they will

Hide inside
  behind blind
Mirrors:
  trembling in tents,
Hearts weak with fear.
  He knows, he likes to
Keep them near.
  And at

Night, with a pride
  too big to
Swallow,
  and with leprous
Hands
  has them hum and dance
To him.
  For they have

Boiled his faith
  into ab-
-straction,
  and coiled up in their
Sickrooms,
  their bodies stir-stir-stir-stirring
In blankets.
  Like a mother's withered

Breast, they still
  set him to
Dreaming
  of quar-
-tering steel
  and of climbing
Fire.
  With a dripping honey

Hole he'll be
  winning them
Over,
  and with calculated
Neglect;
  he likes to know them
There.
  And they will

Know that they
  may only know
The laws of things;
  never their
Meaning:
  only
Laws.
  And they will bury their

Holy blade
  deep in de-
-voted chests.
  And after
Such knowledge,
  what
Forgiveness?
  Desert

Air on skin,
  the chill of empty space,
The smell of empty bodies,
  the sand, the wave,
And nothing,
And nothing.


This page is an experiment in versification. Reuter's song is excellent, but while there are some (mostly) verbally accurate lyrics like this one on Genius.com, they divorce the lyrics from the music.

The song has one four chord pattern throughout while the melodies build over it until the end; lyric sheets often just put line breaks wherever there is a speech pause in the verse, which not infrequently has no relation to the underlying chord pattern. When I read a chord sheet I want the repeating form of the words to match up to the musical changes. Since there is only one chord pattern in the song, then only one stanza should need the chords specified for it, and the rest, having the same shape as that first stanza, should imply the chorrect chord structure. For example, in my chord sheet for the song Kosmoskost, every stanza that follows the structure given by the one starting "Wir essen Kosmoskost..." follows the same pattern (Am C Dm C; one chord per line, chord change on the third syllable) and so after the first I did not bother to specify the chords; it would be redundant. And so for the other structures given in the same song. I think the term to describe what I want is "morphological".

To be completely clear: on this sheet, every verse (every unindented line) is on its own chord. The chords go in order: Em (075000) Gmaj7 (35400x) C (x32010) Em (022000) where the C alternates the B string between open and the first fret, and the final Em alternates the A and D strings between open and second fret. The indents mark the caesura, and in some ways take a double duty since the pace of singing changes between hemistichs on, for example, the first line of each stanza.

The punctuation is almost unnecessary, but that the lead-in to the second stanza would have to share a hemistich with the end of the first justifies it. I would leave it out if it weren't for that. The caesura is in some way a sacrifice to speech patterns since it does not exactly line up with the musical middle of the line but rather only with the voice; in most cases though the two are pretty close. The unindented lines, however, I have tried to keep pretty much exact as to start on the syllable the chord starts on, hence the hyphenation.

There is an alternative version with a different symbol for the caesural break here.


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