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The Spiked Boot

from The Spiked Boot by Rage Inducer

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lyrics

1

Tonight
I take
My last steps
Without pain

The gun
The crowd
My prayers
Become screams

2

They surged through the streets
Of Phnom Penh
Evacuating us
To break up the enemy
Spy organizations
And prevent Americans from bombing us
That’s when we began
To realize
When we saw the preventable deaths
On the long march
They weren’t saviors
Taking our children
To the chankiri tree
To swing them against it
Breaking them
Preventing revenge
For what would happen next

3

And every holiday, every missed birthday
I can’t stop myself from remembering father
The way he stumbled but stayed upright
Those deep creases in his face, his bared teeth
The way he tried to keep the pain from showing

But was betrayed by his body, and the despair
The urgency, the defeat, and the love in his glare
As he made his way toward me, dragging his feet through the mud
While everyone else kept a safe distance, and I turned away

I turned my back on my father in his final days, his last few hours
He died in plain view of everyone, and when my mother wept,
begging for his body to be returned, clutching my baby brother
to her chest, the soldiers laughed

And shouted, and some of them continued laughing when
one ripped my brother away from her protection
Grabbing his tiny leg wrong, ferociously, dangling him,
and from his shrieks you could tell the bones were dislocated or worse
Then the man swung my brother against the timbers of the empty food stall

Again and again before tossing him on the ground for his buddies to stomp
They held her down, my mother, in that muddy square, forced her to watch
Me lick the blood and bits of brain tissue from their Russian-made boots
That was the moment I died for her, it was in her eyes then
The things I did to survive didn’t stop there

She killed herself later, only after making sure my sister got out, got far away, adopted with a new name in another country where none of us from home would ever be able to find her
When my son was born every caress was one of blood squelching under my hand as I traced his features,

sticky chunks of flesh rolling under my palm as I tried to comfort him
Until one day I threw him to the floor, permanently crippling him
Now I wander the streets, drunken, diseased, nowhere to call home

I didn’t understand back then, but now I know my mother was right:
I did not deserve to live. It should have been me who died.
She was right.
I should not have lived.
I should have died.

credits

from The Spiked Boot, released March 31, 2020
John Edward Lawson: vocals, bass, guitars, synthesizers, samples, arrangement, production

Beta Monkey: drums

Sean Schulich (recording engineer Brian Pugh, mixing engineer Garrett Frierson): flute

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all rights reserved

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Rage Inducer Washington, D.C.

Rage Inducer is the post-doom horror soundtrack for a world ravaged by industrialized genocide. The project was created by author and photographer John Edward Lawson in late 2015. Given the worldwide popularity of genocide Rage Inducer draws from popular culture, despite being rooted in doom metal. ... more

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