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