Of a Painting Grim (The Apostle Gray and the Harvest Black) Lyrics

"God will not heal our profound despair”, the painter said,
As he borrowed the gloom from my mirthless eyes,
I heard him sigh, I heard him cry,
With brush in hand, conjuring a masterpiece.

“Time claims to heal but it does not repair” the painter wept,
We talked of graves and gods within graves,
And all the while he painted in flesh unrepented,
A doomed form of landscape art from a brutal yet boyish heart.

I was a sick youth then,
My features thin, my pleasures grim,
I couldn’t walk without crutches,
I daren’t dream without darkness,
But I eased myself off of the bed,
To see what my friend had painted yet.

And I beheld the might of doom,
In all the colors of the world,
Yet the only shades he had employed,
Were the Apostle Gray and the Harvest Black.

A vast portrait of bitterness stood before me,
A man at feast upon a table with limbless child and eyeless wife,
Awaiting them, in a shadowy meadow, the figure of death atop a black winged mare,
Suffering outside of them, my own form marking the footsteps of Death’s dark horse,
All of us begging and begging for the end beneath a sky in a ruin of crippled stars.

I came awake from this portrait to find the painter dead,
So I sat upon his chair, slit my wrist and said a prayer,
And I bled and I painted and I bled and I painted,
I bled as I painted…I bled as I painted…,
Spreading my blood to add some color to his despair.