.
The voice of Maynard James Keenan weaves the tale of suffering which surrounds the perplex inner struggle of Orestes when he is told to avenge his father's death. In order to do such a thing, he had to kill his mother, the woman who weaned him and gave him life. The imagery in the song speaks to the listener powerfully to plait a story rich in emotional conflict. The song begins with the line "metaphor for a missing moment," which paves the way for the rest of the lyrics. Usually in poetry, a metaphor is a device used by a poet to emphasize a situation so that the reader can get into the mood of poem more readily. To state that a metaphor must be found for the missing moment in time implies the situation was beyond the grasp of words when a proper metaphor could not be unearthed to describe the circumstances. The missing moment itself speaks of Orestes wanting to forget this incongruous incident which has caused such an unfair burden on him. The singer becomes Orestes, empowering the song with his rich voice as he sings, "one womb, one shape, one resolve." It is the voice of the fetus inside the womb of it's mother, slowly taking shape into the man he has now become whose only determination is to murder the very woman who birthed him. Here we begin to feel both the grace and sadness felt by Orestes while seeing the purity of his childhood. We must ask ourselves the same question he must be asking, why did all of these events occur and somehow siphon into the hands of one man who is ordered to resolve the matter? When the poem suddenly takes the turn "liberate this will/clear away/snip away and sever this/umbilical residue that's/keeping me from killing you" we are pulled into the undertow of the singer's voice. Here Orestes begs for the release from the motherly bonds, almost unwillingly, and we get the sense of an aborted fetus in the womb due to the actions that must be taken against the mother.