We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Can't Wait 4 The 80's To Be Over Again

by Tread

supported by
/
1.
(first verse): I'm all talk, and no action no walk, just abstraction, a strange lil contraption who hides away while he's rappin, like if I just stay home, then everything might still happen even if I'm not gone and happening with it, sit stoic upon my bed like I'm the first exhibit so you better buy your ticket cus my sedentary rhyming is the sickest that you'll witness in this lazy loser academic poet spouting bullshit from his quilted pulpit genre I invented in a literal minute a minute ago media spinning the image til the mannequins bread and butter head explodes in the very same instant the daguerrotype camera's chemic vile of liquid light flashbangs a photo from a no show to a screenshot show forever sitting up atop your dresser for you to lament thru times both worse and better, "but beautiful nonetheless," written as the foreward header in decorative neon letters, prophylactic in my spastic hand clasped to a cup made with the remains of a plastic man, I dust the dunes of the desert trying to clean-up all the sand so the next procession of humanity can build a city on this land, ugly and hot "but beautiful nonetheless" stacked across the desert dunes in decorative neon which'll stay lit for an eon, after our species has perished under the weight of extreme excess, yet the neon keeps on glowing as an ironic artifact of progress which, by admission, you don't expect like the Spanish Inquisition, but I digress, back with a bullet in my chest which I wear as an inverted necklace wrapped within my hanging garden of an esophagus, lost in the mixed necropolis metropolis of mind with Kurt Vonnegut behind trying to push me off the precipice painted by my own inner impressionist, so it's just a picture, and he keeps on shoving me in the frame like my inner life is just a game. (second verse): can tough be enough if the road rattles rough and the wind writhes right across the windshield, in the middle of the winter? thank you, good sir, now would you please define "sinner"? cus the galaxy is winking at me with the wiley waves of quarks and quasars shining on and on in jest, even know the light's long dead, I'm still looking, still out booking the next flight to that crooked inflection of matter's perception, something my words always fail to mention, at least with the right vibe of declarative tension, Sisyphus is pissed with us cus we've made him push that boulder up Olympus for the good part of a century, justifying it by saying that we do the same thing as him in analogy, thus he's just another casualty of progress's packed academy, imposing one reality, of business-as-vitality, market as a masterpiece tacked up to hide the hole in the drywall looking out across catastrophe that's never sans apostrophe or even deeper atrophy, the most ubiquitous resource they exploit is vulnerability after tragedy, now if God could close his eyes, he might just imagine me, dreaming my entire life into a single night, and when he wakes I'm Neal Cassady, crossing the road in a moral calamity and hovering above the pavement like I've never even heard of this thing called "gravity."
2.
3.
now it's time I clock in to start rhyming, signing my own arrest warrent and realizing I'm the man with the power, the weirdo of the hour gonna make them normies cower til they start to sing my songs in the shower, and it still ain't enough cus they there for the cadence, there for the flow, there for the ancient references to Socrates and Plato, mind designed like it were Play-Doh, salty to the taste and sticky soft to the touch tone, once you get the message you can put down the cell phone, once you get the image you can take the time to Google upload, before you implode on social media with a broadcast nervous breakdown, there for the masses to take in as entertainment right now, watch the world fall apart in real time, or listen to me narrate it for you through my prose poet hip-hop proverb riddle rhymes, I'm the walking talking aphorism, pithy truths shine thru my lyricism, intertextual forever in my observable empiricism pointing out that this given system ain't a given, just a secular religion in praise of competition as essential virtue with a touch of torqued ambition, every time the market busts and comes back in a rush to boom it's like their Holy Christ has arisen, over and over and over again (x2) merry go round on a marriage gone mellow, sittin' with a group of estranged spouses trying to teach em to play cello in some adult classroom workshop, some adults classlessly dancing as the beat drops and the rhymes sop up what's left on the verbal platter, doesn't matter without matter, need this herbal habit just to mute my inner chatter, tripping me up with thoughts tellin' me to feel happy, bouncing back they make me sadder, but if I could keep a chipper smile like the other chaps and call it happy apathy, trapping me inside the beat, revolting as I read the book of Maccabees sifting thru the loose analogies, and here I find my favored fantasy
4.
(first verse + base lyrics): I missed every exam, every chance to prove who I am in the hallowed halls of someone else's accolades standing tall, and as I swam, I couldn't keep my head above water, as I swam, I couldn't keep my head above water, as if I lived to sacrifice myself at the altar as a future example of a man become a lamb who was damned to the slaughter, but without the glory of a martyr, without the altruistic brilliance of a goddamn doctor, fuck a PhD cus like me it's only temporary, can't bring it to the cemetary, or find a place in death to spend a single penny saved kept in the bank as a back-up plan, and yet regardless I'll still die one day, not gonna need your copper, not gonna need your food, not gonna need your honour, not gonna need your nudes, not gonna need your dollars, not gonna need your news, or your views, or your rules, or your schools, or your excuses cus I'll be dead and having nothing left to prove, thus my story shall conclude in this mind of mine, if I'm important then just give it time and historians will find my lines cus they'll have something to prove, they'll have to prove I once existed, once consisted of a mix between persistence and resistance, expressed through the thoughts I put to paper once I'd really stopped to listen... once I'd really stopped to listen... *as I swam, I couldn't keep my head above water* (x2) words are just credit for reality, credit representing our vitality, I don't dream of one day comfortably retiring, I just hope one day I make a salary so I can afford the calories I need "but child, what you make is all dependent on Thine Deeds" find me sinking, not swimming, thinking, not winning, tinkering with words as I'm grinning at the gritty shit that life proves to me is part of "it," as in, "all of it," this single verse in space and time, this bed on which I sit... (second verse): I'm sippin on water, can't afford wine it's fine, I'm fine, just trying to make and take what's mine, maybe I, can declare to the planet, this is Mein Kampf My Struggle, I'm not a neo-nazi, I'm just a muddy-blooded muggle trying to exist with zilch for krill, can't afford what's on the shopping list, but hey, it ain't that bad by any measure, I still got some coffee, got my zoloft, tasting pleasure in the air as I walk through the treasure of I am 'ever' and 'where' I'm wherever, regardless of the weather, regardless of the sun or moon, by God, regardless of the pressure, mother nature got me measured out, she tells me I'm a mountain goat standing on the precipice and yet I never fall into the moat around your castle thinking I can smell your asshole from across a distant plataeu, forgot I spiked the punch bowl, now we all lost in the antipodes, travelling through our minds until we reach the freeze of a southern pole, I'm just trying to establish if there is objective soul, though I've lost my mental bearings with this business I call caring, from thoughtful metaphysics to the clothes that I am wearing, I got my Marxist critique and you got your lovely Toms shoes, 'pay it pay it pay it forward' so the black kids don't sing their southern blues, how disengenuous, you wanna solve the planets issues? I'm still wasting paper wiping tears off with a tissue, naw dude, I don't just miss you, I wouldn't wanna be you, a mind shaped like money and my money shaped like mind, I'm not an angry kid, but I really know my sign, ergo call me Gemini, I can fly without feathers on my wings, I can scream and it comes out soundin' like I sing I got a sing-song voice, it was a gift, not choice, perhaps I'll make a million by the time I'm 26 perhaps I'll burn the krilla when I learn it's all a trick, I'm not a dick, I got a dick. Good save, you prick, avoid the accusation like a slippery piece of shit, I can't hear you over the sounds of my killer rhymes, make your face all puckered with fresh lemons, and rotten limes, defining weirdo line for line, snorting uppers before I meet with Jesus for the last supper, I think it's bread and water which we dine, of course the water turns to wine and us apostles feelin fine I decide to rap for Jesus, and he says, 'please, be so kind,' so I spouted off my letters My bruh, the Son of God, said, 'by Jove, this is no beggar,' as he downs a shot of jaeger, 'This kid's a prophet, and Goddamn he'll make a profit, make a trillion sheckles, he'll upstage both me and Muhammad' and I say, 'I'm 60% water, can you make it into alcohol?' The Original O-Jesus says 'fuck yeah, tonight will be a ball' I take a ball of coke from out my pocket, Jesus eyes get big and round like giant chunks of Lindt chocolate.
5.
6.
7.
8.
sweet good goddamn, fracture my ankle and backbones if ya can, I just wanna be a rapper til I land, and continue with the cosmic poetry, the hopeless woe-is-me or whatever it be, you're listening to the philoso-rapper, placed in category by dewey decimal designation after, cus first the words have to glide on the winds and the currents like a bird trying to find a place to drop a crapper whilst it's wings keep flappin', an essential example of multitasking, am I asking too much when I ask you whatsup? am I asking too much when I ask you whatsup? not like you or I would know, what's above the weather and the solar system and the cosmic light show, so bright, too bright, too luminescent to look straight at tho, eyes might burn and explode, or become fizzle fried flesh that sits dormant and erodes, yet all heard and all told, aren't we doing alright? learning to fight the fight, good or bad don't matter in the same way it's still day somewhere on the globe even at night, half encompassed darkness and half reflecting light from that tiny little star at the center of all our lives, - getting lost in conformity, getting lost in your cunieform eternity, - you can't practice penance like you mean it just standing all ambivalent at the church entrance and seeming to beam the entirety of your guilt to the screen, televangelist teen magazine baggin' these kids with a dime-bag full of benzedrine, pretending it's the human thing to do to stay up all night just to see the sunrise and please the mind behind them tired eyes, truly, they will sleep when they're dead, nothing but the dirt, insects, and plants breaking straight into their head where there thoughts once were, life and death speeding past in retrospect til in esssence this existence is nothing but a blur, sounds, vibrations, and the whirr of laptops never capped off with a closed top, then the beat drops like it never started falling, climbing down a mountain just cus gravity was calling from the base-camp at the bottom of phenomenon's seen crawling to the awning at the peak-door to the sky, nice to meet you, I'm a really weird guy - getting lost in conformity, getting lost in your cunieform eternity, - how paltry was the hurt, and how dirty was the dirt when the world started coming apart with little work on the part of the deconstruction workers, the postmodern sherpas leading us to our mouse cursors lost in the top left-hand corner of the screen, emerging from the phantasmagoric LED, the same place where fake news manufactures fake majorities in the name of racial purity through a new law being decreed, it's the Old World Order declaring there are no curved corners on this earth because it's flat! Exactly like the map we've mistaken it for, North America at center, while Eurasia's torn and displayed, as if the edge of the world resided on the outskirts of the Chinese city of Altay, we strike the middle of the landmass, no masks, just tasks to be ticked off with a check-mark, scribbled in a dark arc cus my printing is such a damned mess, and yes, I'm Petrarch, launching an era whenever I read just to see what the damned book says, my words are the pez, and my mouth the dispenser, I'm a craft for plastic candy with an array of complex senses...
9.
(verse 1): now here's a funky introduction to the things I'll never know, straight above the cavalcade, I scare the horse below, beside a car, we rev the motor hard, trying to keep up with the procession of funeral beggars, the blackest assless chaps are also legless, sorry Yahweh, that hairy Dalai Lama is my shephard, I made sure my eggs were peppered, my skin leapord-print, effortless death by a mocha sans peppermint, my head can't spin on an axial tilt, it just leans from side to side like a rose that wilts, am I so beautiful you can't announce it? trounce the competition with discounts that slit that proverbial throat? all the competition, face-down in the river surrounded by clouds of blood as they float, now that's all just a metaphor, see me with your microscope like I'm omnipotent, molecular, we got you tight between these teeth of freedom as we force you to be secular, I just find cold comfort staring, void, into my cellular, cus I'm a reservoir of history, poli sci, Greek and Roman studies, and philosophy, the profs can't get enough of me, they love my straight hypocrisy, banshee screech 'let's save the environment' as I waste a thesis on these trees, please, forcefully enforce the Green Peace, canvas stained sheets across the awning, watching my life pass in timelapse looks sorta like the Devil yawning (verse 2): I'm the probable equation when the bankers add-up krona at an Asian Stock exchange, reconquista Spain, it's strange like the common sense I'm hiding in my change, dig through deeper pockets til you and Uni both the same, waiting, sorrow. there's a sparrow in my windpipe, yes I'm Hasselhoff in height, dreaming til the winds right, I'm blind, maybe. maybe, maybe in the past, when I see I'm just a poor boy eating Pho, sat on my ass. it was a Thai food restaurant when she told me I came fast, too fast, like the grand prix, like the man he, claimed he, wished he, was. bitch we, buzzed, like we what, flies in a helicopter, check your prostate cus I'm Dr. Proctor, pictures of 3 daughters in a dirty locker, call me mother fucker, sand fucker, ice nigga, cold. yes ma'am I'm from Canada, buying houses with my money from the igloos that I've sold, 22 years young, 260 months old, still don't know if Santa's got my new address so he can send me coal, or if he's got a million dollar bills tightly wrapped into a roll, either way, man, I'll never be rich, I ask my girl for food as if hunger were an itch I've gotta scratch, "not my back-scratcher, I can't afford it," Rob Ford's Greatest Hits, Big Shiney Tunes 9, Feeling Nickelback inside, I've got national pride if you consider how wide I glide every time I dive hiiiiigh...
10.
how baked is your cake when you wake up feelin as liquid as a lake, for godsakes or mansakes or pancakes or waffles, I'm a fat loser in a thin body's awful, toss whole bags of milk out a window cus we livin in the east, I'm far out, mind stuck in reverse mind stuck in the west, I thought I called this weather blessedd but instead I just thought of how much money I could funnel through my best kept efforts, as I dive high, don't mind me as I dive high, don't mind me (x2) I'm fallin down man, yeah, I'm dying, I'm finding, the finest of the kindest friends of mine inside my mind, and in my heart, like an organ I don't smoke to kill, but I knew and loved from the start... all alone at home ignoring phone calls playing Mario Kart lots of love in this angel, I'm the headline on Der Speigal, I float as free as 40 seagulls on their way to Polynesia, man I need ya, as I dive high, don't mind me (x2) you're a dreamer like me, you can afford the time to think but not the money to be free, a dreamer can't afford his coffee creamer, by night an avid rapper, and by day some sort of cleaner this world can make you jaded, I stay faded so I process piece by piece til Thanksgiving ain't a feast, it's a funeral. as I dive high, don't mind me (x2)
11.
I can't live without the game, the rap game that I play, the verse is like faucet, if it isn't flowing, then it must be dripping, my life feels like I'm high on a whip-it and unzipping my beginnings as to tie up all loose ends, new friends, a new family, and loose sands, on a very wet beach with the Tao Te Ching preaching to no one in particular, "this is what Lao Tzu says," presumably as he's chewing on a bamboo stem, I'm not any tamer than zen with an x, but I'm cleaner than the Thames, walking on dirty water til I cross that mare nostrum into Bethlehem, can't begin until it's over and the rain evaporates my shame in the blinding light of a spring day, when there's a negative assertion about working on the surface while rehearsing all the wording I need straight and solid before I can weaponize it all for flirting, circling my failures like a vulture posed as a savior of the culture, burning out my rubber while straight choking on the sulfur (or the sulphites) in my wine while I whine that I'm fine but the grind still grates me to brittle little crime committer seeking acquital, and I'd like to say I'm centered but I think I'm only stuck --- in the middle with you, bones, muscles and sinews, coming apart from the tissue life's a story to be continued, in a grim mood, or a granular complacency, I'm just swimming in the adjacent sea, the one that's rippling next to me as I add a sign above the motel of my life that says, "sorry, there's no vacancy" cus in desperation I chase my vocation refusing to capitulate to my basic vagrancy, cus that's what all the people in my life with good jobs and mortgages preach that I need to succeed, but indeed, I'm nothing, boner jam slam, forget my age, I'm twentysomething and I'm nudging a curmudgeon to instill some optimism, or at least a sense of brahmanism while I drop all the lingo, part of my abiding pioneer spirit must come cus I'm a quarter gringo, have you ever heard me sing tho? if I put my songs on YouTube, I'd be joining a legion of Ed Sheerans, tis the season to watch re-runs except I'm pouring over Chronicles of the Crusades, trying to learn each space in time like I find sheet music in combing thru the decades, one by one, it's a campaign to capture the hills of the brain with the flag of new knowledge, can't afford it but somehow I'm still in college, creating a collage of credit deficit, student loan just the preface of a life full of debt death slavery, make me poor and all unsavory...
12.
cooking the numbers inside of my humbled numb-skull of a head, so far ahead of the rest, stuck on red at the intersection's bend, waiting for the gas light to light up and gas-light my sense of modernity, which excludes the possibility we'll burst into eternity, like it's a New Age tutelage worthy of nothing more than reductive rage, as if from an old book on an old page and the written word can't turn itself over, so opaque in its acceptance of this friendly takeover, like a brainwashed slave trying to behave for his owner as he replaces the printer's emptied ink toner, empty so the soul can come and learn to start Bowling for Columbine, sans any dopamine dressed in dollar signs and earned in excess thru signing on the dotted line, shit, you so rich you can afford a concubine, basically a slave wrapped in dollar chains as you sip on marsala wine and chant, "bitch, you better dance, and god help you if ya can't cus that's what I paid for, and if it's what I paid for, it must be what you're made for," from your superficial skin tone straight down to your claimed core, must the master really say more or implore the world for a change of face just to change the pace and phase the body from the mind into a maze, where the cave ain't big enough for either of us tigers, so we fight til we survivors dangling alone among the wires, if there's escape from this sad sorrow it'll make me a better writer, say with time it'll make my rhymes a lot tighter with less purged exertion required on the part of my inner fire (x2)
13.

credits

released January 26, 2019

Cover art designed & illustrated by one of my very best friends ever, the fabulously wonderful Madison Verde (originally from Prince Rupert but now working out of Victoria, BC).

If you'd like to reach out to her for inquiries in regards to purchasing her artwork or her services thereof, contact this page for further information.

license

tags

about

Tread Powell River, British Columbia

Cosmic poetry in infinite motion until we realize there is no end, after which he keeps on rhyming
--**--ethereal
oddball
rap--**--

contact / help

Contact Tread

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like Tread, you may also like: