Part 2 finds us a few years down the road. Family life has further deteriorated, and Judas' father spends most of this time in the pub offering drunken solutions to the social and economic problems that are growing throughout the society. As Judas describes his disdain for his father, he reveals a conflict between his vulnerability and anger, tending to favor anger as a way of coping. Ultimately, Judas' father is drafted into a long-standing war on foreign soil, and Judas refuses to reconcile with him. He is unable to understand the readiness with which his parents reconcile their differences and forgive one another as his father goes to war. Judas' anger continues, and he refuses to speak to his father on the phone, his last opportunity to reconcile before his father goes missing in action.
lyrics
Part 2 - Pub Politics
Pub politics,
A gathering of contradictions,
Aimed at settling problems
In two distinct ways.
The personal, amicable,
The heretical solutions,
Gathered and tossed among the enemies
Of the state.
Treasonous statements
Excite the corner frequencies
Of the tiny room,
In their infinite loop.
The worker’s revolution
Securely soaks into the stone and booze
After closing time,
Insulated for now.
My father had not told
A story of inspiration, old or new,
And my mother seemed to miss it,
Though she’d spent so little laughter before.
She seemed to resent my presence,
Almost as much as his absence,
But I hated him more.
I hated him most when he left for the war.
He swore he had no choice,
Selected for service, another man’s war,
The only way home through a foreign campaign,
Far away…
I didn’t care.
He wasn’t a revolutionary,
Just a gathering of contradictions.
A man looking for a way out.
The charming, the amicable,
That man had left years ago,
The enemy to a foreign poor man now.
The infinite loop is broken,
Still soaked in booze.
His priorities remained
Where they always were:
Thoroughly with himself.
Mother wasn’t angry,
She was sad…
Though they seemed closer now,
As if they finally understood
Each other.
He called one day,
Wanting to speak to me.
I wouldn’t.
Phone calls from the dead
Ring less hauntingly than from the living.
I laughed in my anger and pride,
How haunting
When the dead and living are the same.
Officially missing,
But surely gone.
credits
from Exile of the Moon,
released December 16, 2018
Composed by Shawn Knabel
Exile of the Moon is a project and a world imagined by Shawn Knabel as a platform for introspective storytelling. The stories revolve around the conflicts between a fictional planet and its moon.
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