Up On The Block

from Knack for Negligence by Eric Dahl

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lyrics

Up on the Block

© 1995 by Eric Dahl

At a time of flat broke privilege
When I lived out in the wheat fields,
You were a friend like I’d never known
from a three-star city, wrong part of town.
I never knew the walls could come down,
till they were lying there on the ground.

You said, “You be my stable one,
as I try to forget the men and boys
waiting in the rain, wherever I walk.
Strange how childhood’s never over when it’s done,
Shades each promise like background noise,
up on the block.”

Why I was reading
the books I was reading I don’t know today.
Can you imagine explaining to your lover
bout Catherine of Sienna when the devil had his way.
He filled her with visions of the worst carnal acts
Like pages and pages from our magazine racks.
Catherine pushed it all away saying,
“A strong heart is blind.”
Now they’d just say she’s losing your mind.

You be my stable one,
as I try to forget the men and boys
waiting in the rain, wherever I walk.
Strange how childhood’s never over when it’s done,
Shades each promise like background noise,
up on the block.

Sometimes you get off easy after a term of delusion,
A year or a month or a day.
But sometimes there’s no illusion, you’re just losing a friend,
We both knew you wouldn’t stay.
He came for you one evening in a shining black car,
One front tooth had a gold inlay star.

We still walk in the wheat fields,
through hills of shimmering brass,
through a million bushel resurrection
of tears like grain, sown here in the pain of the past.

You be my stable one,
waiting in the rain, wherever I walk.
Strange how childhood’s never over when it’s done
Shades each promise like background noise,
up on the block, up on the block, up on the block.

credits

from Knack for Negligence, released July 1, 1995

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about

Eric Dahl Seattle, Washington

His music ranges from acoustic neo-rockabilly to thoughtful and reflective with a voice somewhere between Johnny Cash and Lou Reed.

ericdahlmusic.com

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