1. |
Lithium
04:14
|
|||
|
I’ll appreciate you
When i’m old enough to
Know to care
Or feign to care
When all the good drugs can’t be done
And all the men have all used up what’s mine
And mine what's theirs
I’ll thank that I have settled down
And drawn the pros and cons of
Accepting you and staying put
I’ll draw the blinds and go to bed
And look at you and sigh and take you in
and forgo prayer
Lithium, my second love
You do your job just fair
And for what price?
Well, you’ll take my kidney someday
At least I’ve got a pair
You make me act more useful
You treat me right be keeping me in check
And straight in line
I’ll make no grasps at power
I’ll give up trying to improve
I’ll dream much smaller and i’ll
Be Just Fine
We’ll have a boring sex life
But it’s alright cause i know no one else
Could ever love me like
And when the company axes me
The market crashes and i’ve nothing left
You won’t really mind
I love you with an asterisk
Cause there sure as shit ain’t passion
Ain’t no wedding bells, no lips to kiss
But i’d rather love without a risk
Cause you kill me like the others
But for a cheaper price and sans the writ
Lithium my second choice
More stable but less fair
And i resign
Like a good man, tow the line
Eyes forward and blank stare
Lithium my next best love
The truth countering my dare
I’ll be just fine, more lovable,
But less inclined
Stay here, but be less there
|
||||
2. |
||||
|
It's etiquette, it's simply etiquette
and love ain't no requisite
for being polite,
a true northerner you're nice
but nice ain't that relevant
just veils over your epithets
the saccharine that hides
the black of your unkind
you claimed you love Oliver
but I can't ignore it, you never read half her work
and less of mine
oh, and I got less time
You were celibate
and should've stayed celibate
but thought "for the hell of it,
he's cheaper than wine
but so much more caustic
but fine, he could sufficed
if only his zipper lips
would stay locked like mine
or burned like the barn that raised him"
Your lie: you wanted us homesteading
an acreage afforded by compulsive forgetting
and the suicide hotline
Your lie: you claim you love all of her
the parts you divorced like a blackout poem
shoehorning your own mind
projected by gaslight
|
||||
3. |
Ode to Hartford Road
04:56
|
|||
|
My old bear plush doll
Blue fluff, white stomach, some red from
The battles youth involves
No use for a name
Just secrets he had deigned to keep but
He ran off with them all
Under wayward trains
Joint roaches, snuffed cigarettes
And the homeless camps swept up
Dead pets in graves
The universe of kids decays
And the Yakima river’s runoff
Sheltered some, weeds overrun
The indian res cries out “the gall”
The dead buried, some life, just weeds
True human nature overtakes by fall
The beige, brown a-frame
The fragile roof did leak some in
But it never could’ve washed
Two rusted cars
The junk heaps my dad said he’d fix but he gave up on us all
The shag rug, his stash of drugs
The good kush Jimmy oversaw
The deer bleeds, the kids won’t see
My childhood struck by a wrecking ball
Malls kept in place
The mission’s overrun, turn kmart
Into a new unused u-haul
No place to take
If all goes well it will come back
Respite from suburban sprawl
Now empty, the youth don’t see
The river is the one that took the fall
Survival, capital
They sleep outside in city lines
They are the river and you are just the
White
Overdue, the valley floods with educated youth
The toll taken like 1992
The dyke we watched fall into the brownish yakima
Pasted over cheap city blacktop
|
||||
4. |
Ode to Manastash Ridge
05:06
|
|||
|
Manastash Ridge and backpacks
Feigning happy and playing dumb
Lashes did bat and blood did flow then
But it was all under a setting sun
What’s winter’s kill for college kids driving back home
Become a racetrack for summer’s love
The awesome power God we met he spared us hunger
For the drama we’d construct
That girl’s now dead and no one I’ve met
In the interim has shown me much
Do I regress in honor of what pain I’ve caused
Bleeding in this U-Haul truck
The next died too, won’t God strike all of us down
And wasn’t I told through me he’d move
I sit in sun half-basking half-aflame and wonder
Could I ever fall in love
I wish I’d had a car
To carry you home
It’s evidence of loss
It’s evidence of snow
The awesome power of god
Could Raymond Carver hone
This obfuscating loss
Into a pleasant poem
It’s over and it’s done
To renton, kent, chicago
The cheatgrass under sun
Begging for wind to blow
No long wave, short wave home
The radio tower blinks
Blood red and going home just brings the
Union sewage stink back
No power moves the fault
A flaccid richter scale
No femininity
I’m maskless, I’ve impaled
Just suffrage of impaled
The neoliberal’s lost
If dworkin sang a song
The ode I wrote to nausea
I’m evidence of loss
A counterpoint of God
Overdue
Apologies to all the wasted youth
The dust settles I wasted all theirs too
Evidence of loss and not of You
|
||||
5. |
Ode to Interstates
04:53
|
|||
|
Earrings, and old forgotten clothes
A novel of a letter from someone you barely know
The mother of a partner that you may as well have wrote
You met him when you needed to
He offered you a rope
Scan the room as you discard them
And burn the mental image in your eyes
Though all memories are forgotten
Your youthful ignorance tells you to try
To remember the place, you're moving out in a few days
Deciding what goes to the new apartment
What's important is in a rental truck
Your furniture, guitars, microphone stands
What's rendered useless in a dumpster bag
The sentimental shit you'd never miss
The hubris of the task, as if there's such a thing as trash
What's out of reach will never be let go
Pillows your skin had got to know
The svent-stained mattress that reliably kept you from the cold
Slept on it for a decade
Still, now it has to go
You use shit while it serves you
When inconvenient you let it go
Repeat the process before the years end
The lease, the least of promises you break
Another hundred miles the box trucks go
Your toxic codependence on the brakes that
Slow you into place, avoiding danger in the waves
Of traffic, men, and rentals you debase
Swallow your fickle pride and go
Another couple hundred miles beats starving in the cold
You scorn your wealthy mother and the check on which she wrote
For a half a mil replacement for your now gone childhood home
Heroes know nothing I don’t know
No soft white savior under thumbs of ceilings and escrow
Exist for those whose houses stand while beaten out of homes
The uselessness of shacking up for shelter out of rote
Roman, evicted you with fists
The next one did with similar force from what lies between his hips,
And all befores and afters by that lingering impoverished stench
Your love affords you nothing when your hubris is in debt
So, this unrepentant ode
To uhaul trucks and journeymen and cars of friends and those
Half benevolent strangers carrying me like cargo
A sycophant to interstates, a slave to open roads
|
||||
6. |
Tutorial #4
01:01
|
|||
|
Good day
The morning's always scored by songs of
hey hey
Annoying odes carried by what's your namesake
Flighty bluebird fuckers that harrass
Oy I
Heard you raped a boy in illinois
You
Flocked away praying it would be safe
What a funny word when used by birds of pray
You fucked up so bad
In retrospect you've earned the childhood you had
inflict it onto others it's not so bad
"If I can bear it, he can bear it too"
You color so good
Professors love you, artists love you
So sad your mother couldn't, father couldn't
Too bad
At least you learned your lesson: how to rape
|
||||
7. |
||||
|
Joshua, young is a natural taste
I’m not judging you, you’re biologically prone
And I was good at lying then…
But I wasn’t, who can be at sixteen?
And who can be so dumb to believe it?
Am I missing you? Or just the innocent boy
Whom you were the first of any man to believe in
I was not like you, am I now?
That I am of a similar age?
I am missing you, am I now?
Joshua full of niceties and customer service phone calls
a hyundai that was nicer class but still just a hyundai
a philosophy degree that you finished while training to be a costco
employee
I never saw it hung upon your wall were you ashamed of it
thirty grand just tucked into your bookshelf in the double-wide
the hidden pride so apropos of a gay man in a trailer park in that town
‘tween naches
And Gleed just as you were to make a halfway decent living, then
your mother left this house for you to make pancakes and watch Roseanne
in and I know every show that played while you were chipping away at writing
Writing what?
I never had the guts to ask but did what you were reading, then
You said “one by Tim Dean about the passionate loving of gay men”
and I was so impressed when you were sad you read a book to cheer you up
That you lent me
Joshua, I don’t want to spare you grace
I’m not judging you, you’re so alright
And I was fine
Joshua full of mystery you told me you had changed your name
While wishing I could meet whoever you were before changing it
and thought about the lottery and wondered about your childhood then of me
And mine
How you could only influence and I was just a sponge for it
Yet i could never leave a stain on you outside the ones i did
‘Tween the creases of your bedsheets where you welcomed me and I could grasp at power
Through those folds
The one’s inside your head were not free
I’m not begging you, for access there
But I could stand to leave but a stain in
You can wash those sheets, you could’ve washed my mind
But you declined
I’m grateful for you, am I now?
|
||||
8. |
Joe
02:39
|
|||
|
was homeless and shook up
you made me look inside myself
and with the air of a wise monk
you taught me everything I knew
I do feel grace for you
I do feel some grace for you
a schizotype with a wide smile
installed by dentists in that year
a mountain dew and a roll-up
a cigarette to share with you
I do feel rage at you
I do feel some rage at you
A fuzzy head and a limp wrist
You juggled yin and yang with ease
With banter that could impress me
Though conflated with disease
I do feel grace for you
I do feel some grace for you
I do feel some love for you
I do feel some hate for you
|
||||
If you like Benjamin Bock, you may also like:
More oddball indie pop gems from the notebook of this playfully bent singer-songwriter.
go to album
The lush dream pop of A Beacon School combines effervescent melodies with driving percussion.
go to album
Danny Seim (Menomena), Bryan Devendorf (The National), & Dave Nelson (Sufjan Stevens) craft charmingly scuzzy pop.
go to album
Lively psychedelic EP from French pop'ster Pablo Padovani who also plays in Melody's Echo Chamber.
go to album
The gorgeous and gripping new record from Anika Pyle features minimalist folk & pop songs that struggle to make sense of loss.
go to album
Oh Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs
by Blood Cultures
The mysterious masked group Blood Cultures returns with a record of bubbling, tuneful synthpop.
go to album
featured on Bandcamp Radio Apr 16, 2019
go to album
