Memento Mori

The fans would whirl
Like the blades of a copter
Liftin' into the skies above some foreign land
Soaked with the bodies of so many friends
Johnny waved

He was on his way home
He waved goodbye to his comrades in arms
And all the twisted things he had seen
He waved goodbye

Then the blades hit something
Maybe just fate, but the blades hit
The copter went up in flames
And Johnny never went marching home
Johnny never went marching home

They took his name, and they carved it on a slab of marble
With several thousand other names
All the fallen idols
The apples of their mother's eye
Just another name
Meanwhile, back on that burning shore
Johnny's comrades stood speechless
They looked up, up, up with misbelieving eyes
As those bits of metal and the embers
The embers of his eyes fanned out into the air
Black dust, flames

Oh Johnny, someday they'll make a movie about you
And in the making of that movie, of some mad apocalypse
It will become even stranger than this simple act
Just a boy going up, up, up
Just a boy going up

In flames, in the smoke
Just another life, just another breath
And who'll remember all eternity now?
As eternal as a sheet of marble
Eternal as a slab on a Green Hill

And your name
And all your fallen brothers
And all the ones not cut
All the ones remembered only in the hearts
A mother or a father or a brother or sister
Or a lover, a son, daughter
Shall not, shall not fade
Shall not fade
Your ancestors salute you
And the gods of your ancestors salute you
Having, having been formed by the minds of your ancestors
The gods of your ancestors salute you
Having been formed by your ancestors
The gods of your ancestors salute you

They draw you in, they draw you through
They draw, they draw you through that golden door
Come in, boy, come in
We remember you

We conceived of you, we conceived of your breath
We conceived of the whole human race
And we conceived it to be a beautiful thing
Like a tulip bending in the wind
Sometimes it comes back to us
In the form of the hand filled with dust
Comes back in the form of a smitten child

Our raped daughters are the broken bones
Souls cleaved from hearts
They come back to us
And our hands are filled with their rotting tissues
But we turn not our backs, we press our lips
Into their cancer and into the dust and into the remains of each one
And that love is there and we'll greet you, and we greet you
Come in, boy, it's eternal love
Well, here, go ahead
Run through that plane
Oh, man, run it through your mind
You took a cat, you took a life
You took it by the tail and you swirled it around your head

And you thrashed it
You smashed the life out of it
Then you knew that would be your own
But you wanted to feel, you wanted to feel it die
Because you knew you would feel your own
You would feel your own

But you're remembered
You're remembered
You're remembered dead
You're remembered dead
You're remembered dead

We remember
We remember
We remember
Everything, everything