Gumball

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

Little Bird
-------------------------------------------------
I had a little bird who nested on my shoulder
He whispered in my ear to tell me all he’d heard
I took him for his word, appeared to be a friendly bird
But his word proved flighty
As we dove for Aphrodite
Dying for more, more, more

Indeed, my feathered friend, he had his own convictions
And naked as a jay, he bid my wings unfurl
Too little and too late, he bargained for a beautiful girl
To show me, in earnest, how my heart is like a furnace
A-blackened with coal and shale

I hear it from the bats abreast about my belfry
My freedom’s but a word that echoes off their cave walls
Although they will alight, to feast again when darkness falls
They’re still there when I need them
So I clothe them and I feed them
Knowing full well, in the Twilit,
They might catch like linseed rags and
Burn in their skin! The flesh wills it
Yet the hearth of unbound spirit
Don’t want to forgive the man

A lack within a lass, would soon become a parent
Who drove us from our bed, expelled us from the womb
Like all my great escapes, an ape that threw a bone to the moon
Once I died, completely, and woke up with my car keys
To her crying please, you Houdini,
Don’t complete the act, don’t leave me
Ne me que te pas! Well, it came to pass
That we had fallen through the center of an hourglass
Holding hands
Will she ever forgive that man?

© Kevin Ivester 2019

Little Bird - Hades Moon Live

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

The Pale King 
--------------------------------------

Cloak and dagger and a cloven tongue
Three sought a Hawthorne tree 
To carve in Kroatoan (kro-a-toan)
So who discerns between what’s made and what’s begotten?
In a colony, gone rotten

God save the queen when the king is high
No man can slight a hand
Of upside down black crosses
No king can put together what the Lord divorces
With low standards
And high horses

They’d never keep you in the stable 
Yet some see fit, they put you in a bridle
Then they conspire to ride you into danger
Love you, leave you, then they treat you like a stranger
Like the others
They only want you for your body
They only want you for your money
They only want you for a minute
After they've collected their fee

Bridge

As I'd we've always played these parts
We two mortal enemies who wake each other's hearts
You were a bomb on my airplane
And I’m getting lit, because I'm honestly insane
In a wake you left behind you

I weep as I follow the scent of you
To secret gardens our stillest essence yearns to
(Where time will dignify most anything we do)
If I find it, might I bring it back to you?

It’s been so long since I’ve seen light,
You see right through me





© Kevin Ivester 2019

The Pale King - Hades Moon Live

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

No One Else
------------------------------
If your father
If he could see things you’ve done
I bet he’d say he had no son
He might try to take you back

If your mother, 
If she had seen the shit you’ve tried
I bet you she’d agree you died 
On the roadside, in Iraq
Welcome back
To a room with no view, no windows to look through
There’s targets and means to employ
On behalf of my sister who choked on her voice
You should have died when you had been deployed

Darkness, brother - I dream of carving out your heart
That would be a real fine start
But I don’t want to go to jail, having failed
To split your tongue
And make you feel the pain you’ve caused
As if that would give you pause 
Or show you to yourself
If nothing else…

Making heaven from hell, all rapists and killers
They suffer alone with themselves
I’ll hate, for my sake, no one else

© Kevin Ivester 2019

No One Else - Hades Moon Live

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

YOLO
-----------------------
There’s a place, yo
Where we lay low

A bar like a bath house
Windswept with antiseptic
Where lonely hearts get down 
With subclinical epileptics
And scream YOLO
I don’t think so
Still I cannot tell another lie
They put on a show I shut my eyes 
And dance to the loudest beat
and repeat

But haven’t you heard, man?
The people have won the election
Our gooses are cooked then
In ovens of our own confection

Music is my outlet 
I found it electrifying
I learned a few cool ways
To lose weight without even trying
How could I hide it from the world?
If I can’t even hide if from a girl?
Sing if you know that tune
Badum bum

Fade into quiet bridge?
It’s like… It’s like, I died… It’s like I died, and went to heaven
Are you having fun yet, Kevin?

Go back to the garden
The first tongue to taste a pleasure
Was bound to be burned when 
It learned we were not each other
Just to taste somethin
Devour the salten pillar
Until there is nothing 
As if you had never met her
Once I read someone wrote a book
It’s bound by my skin and has my looks
Inspired in fire, once divined,
I know the face, the hand is mine
And while I burn pages to stay warm
Somewhere there’s a curtain curtly torn
The first page I read, it read:
They say YOLO,
I don’t think so

© Kevin Ivester 2019

YOLO - Hades Moon Live

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

Marietta
------------------------
Hail Marietta, heavy hang the breasts
That have served, hitherto, to mark one's social class
Given to phlebotomy, drained and wholly spent
Given no heroic medicine would bear me stand again
They lay such a veil upon me, these melancholy days
Where I’m left alone to wandering
Lily’s day, had I wasted it? No…

Loneliness forevermore, raven at my door
a blank page drafting craven images
Drifting in full dress, at banquets of the heart
Where my love is consumpted
Where I feel for women, as women feel for men 
For the curse my love had wrought on me 
I made a quill from the feathers
Don’t think a man is gonna write it any better
If God’s a man, how could he write her… out?

I’ll take laudanum, please, I cannot face the day
With a heart that’s turning black as ink
Black as the day, Marietta,
When you knew she wasn’t getting any better
If God’s a man, how could he let her

Slip away?(Now, now)
And I’m slipping away, as well.
Slipping away… (Now, now, now…)

You said a prayer, Marietta
On the first day you knew that you loved her
But God’s a man, just like any other
He won’t let you be
Yourself 

© Kevin Ivester 2019

Marietta - Hades Moon Live

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

Swallow yourself by the tail
Insides outside
Lurching leprous through the shale
Starving in the belly of a whale

Thought I'd heard unearthly tones
No hay banda
Sealed the spirit in a stone
Walking through the woods alone

Now the hour is at hand
Last chance, new plan
Hungry host at your command
Won't comply with your demands

Fear the reaper, not the man
Who sowed all this
Holding the world in his hands 
And betrayed by a kiss


© Kevin Ivester 2019

Swallowtail - Hades Moon Live

Performed Nov 23, 2019 at the Estrella Collective in Santa Cruz
In collaboration with Keiley Joy's presents "Hades Moon: Saturn's Bedside Manner"
Recorded live by Zach Gentry

The Traveller
------------------------------

I love a girl, they call her the Traveller
Powerful princes rode out to court her
But no matter
She didn’t love them
Could not abide to dwell in their kingdoms
She lives with me, a draftless writer
Bitter young man in love with his anger
A cracked mirror
She couldn’t see me,
Living in my vicarious vanities

We made a quarantine
Where querents cut their teeth
And lost in all that we were, I see
Past lives and wrathful gods
Golden means and lightning rods
Slowly acting poison and a broken word
Living in a tower with her pet bird
Where there’s no vampire
Who can draw out blood from the stones
Where an incarnation endures
Postpones
The thought that she shouldn’t have to feel like that
I drank her pain, it drove me mad
And all I got now is a pen and a pencil
And sex with the existential

My teeth chatter, my eyes roll back
Into a void that I had painted black
Of all the milligrams to cross my path, 
Melissa spoke a pentagram in stagecraft
To set an actor free, you’ve got to rip the script from their hands
I couldn’t play the part
I wasn’t half that man
To part an ocean, first, you’ve got to thank the desert for thirst
Steel yourself - do your worst
When your world unfurled like a dragon pearl tea leaf
It stoked some sacred flame inside me
I read heiroglyphs in the halls of my lover
Characters the only way we understand (eachother)

I love a girl, they call her the Traveller
Powerful princes rode out to court her
But no matter
She didn’t love them
Could not abide to dwell in their kingdoms

My teeth chatter, my eyes roll back
Into a void that I had painted black
Of all the milligrams to cross my path, 
Melissa once taught me

No regrets, just lessons learned 
You can’t depart until you can’t return
I saw the future on a Grecian urn,
Spinning off the present though it’s stillborn
Does it still burn? Turning in your passport with your tale turned
So lonely…. How can you be lonely? 

Where there’s 
No Matter
Only Energy
When have you ever been apart from me?~

© Kevin Ivester 2019

The Traveller - Hades Moon Live

Jawbone

I wondered, which way? So I wandered the witch way.

Genet Sais Pas