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The Farmer and the Viper

from Alyosha by Joshua Powell

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about

This is based on an Aesopian fable about a farmer who pities a snake dying of exposure and tries to rescue it. Certain elements of identity are unchangeable. I believe in grey areas, but I also believe that there is some good that's just good and some evil that's just evil. That's this song's story.

lyrics

Kentucky snow/and my bones are fairly shaken
in the winter and its waking on the land I’m cultivating
and I watch a detonation of crows
Out of the dogwood/where the leaves all quit attempting
and the witchhazel is empty just like everything is dead
exempting me, out in the cold

And there he lay/like the devil was a cropper
on my family’s farming proper, tiny bones and head of copper in the loam
shivering to death
He wasn’t moving, and I knew the antidote
pity rose up in my throat, and so I put him in my coat to get him warm
and carry him back home

Well why should I oversimplify? It’s good to be alive
So logically, all living things are good if not misunderstood
and I will not play God, arbitrating, arrogantly designating who should live

Well then it happened—I bet you already guessed
when I called the cursed blessed he sank his fangs into my chest and through my shirt
and put his venom in the veins
As I was dying, I thought it rather fitting
that my heart produced the pity and that’s the spot the snake bit me
and I know nature doesn’t want changed

Well I should have compromised—I didn’t realize the demon at my doorstep
But with one slash of Sheol’s knife, he cut down the tree of life
And stacked the wood for kindling and the laughter that I’m sure will follow after this life

credits

from Alyosha, released October 14, 2015

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Joshua Powell Indianapolis, Indiana

Joshua Powell is the exhausted wizard at the helm of IN's most haunted rock band. From his hardcore roots in the Floridian swamps and beyond the fever dream of his folk era, his literary lyrics dig for enlightenment in a surrealist muck. “Four LP's and over 900 shows later, the midwestern road dog's ever- evolving, transcendent style embraces hallucinatory metal and grimy psychedelia.” -Audiotree ... more

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