The Cure Was the Stopping (Grigori Rasputin)

Lyrics

[Verse 1 — Dr. Pope]
They fed you cyanide in little cakes
and you asked for another
The wine was laced and you drank it like communion
then stood up and reached for the prince
who offered you a bullet instead
You took three and walked to the courtyard
trailing something that was not quite blood
but closer to stubbornness made liquid

[Verse 2 — Orikusis]
Before all that you were just hands —
Siberian peasant hands, cracked at the knuckles
pressing a hemophiliac boy's skin
until the bleeding slowed
No one understood why it worked
least of all you
You just knew the place inside the body
where panic lives
and you talked it quiet

[Chorus — Both]
They threw you in the frozen river
wrapped in carpet like a gift
the Neva swallowed and spat you back
because even the water
couldn't find the part of you that ends
You kept arriving — poisoned, shot, half-drowned —
as if dying were a language
you simply refused to learn

[Verse 3 — Dr. Pope]
The tsarina believed you were holy
the priests believed you were a devil
Both were describing the same thing
from different rooms in the same burning house
You drank their wine, you touched their children's fevers
you stumbled through the palace
with Siberian mud still in your beard
and the court couldn't decide
if you were the cure or the disease

[Outro — Orikusis]
The river finally kept you
but the legend climbed out dripping
and hasn't dried since
Somewhere a boy stopped bleeding
because a peasant's hands pressed down
and that — not the poison, not the ice —
is the drawer nobody opens