Skald's Toll (version 2)

Intro

Old world had a gate where the traveler had to sing

Couldn't cross the bridge without a verse to offer the king

My people carried that debt in a different tongue

Same toll, different coin, same song unsung

Verse

Grandfather sang at doors when the harvest went dry

Traded couplets for bread, made the landlord's wife cry

Said a hungry man with rhythm eats better than one with a plow

Word was currency then, word is currency now

I learned the trade off his tape, hiss and static and all

Recited his lines back to a crack in the wall

Every gate that I've hit since has asked for the same toll

Prove it in sixteen bars or don't cross the road

Booth was my bridge, mic was my gatekeeper's ear

Paid every session in ash and a fifth of fear

Landlord don't take metaphors, he takes it in rent

But the corner remembers the verse that I spent

Buying my mother a coat with a sixteen I sold

Cousin got jumped for the tape 'fore the story was told

So I write with a limp now, favor the leg that still stands

Every scar on this arm is a toll paid by hand

Chorus

The gate don't open free, it opens for a rhyme

Every scar I got's a toll I paid on time

Some men pay in silver, I paid in the truth

Same road, same weight, different kind of proof

Verse

Uncle kept a ledger, wrote the debts in a code

Half of it in numbers, half in verses he owed

Said the toll compounds if you swallow it whole

Better to spend the pain than to let it turn cold

I watched him spend it Sunday, pulpit made of a crate

Preaching to the block like the block was a gate

Collection plate came back with more lint than a dime

But the words he gave out lasted longer than the time

I took his cadence, sharpened it into a blade

Cut through every silence that the city had made

Every booth's a bridge, every sixteen's a toll

Every plaque on the wall is a debt that got sold

They call it a come-up, I call it a trade

Same coin my grandfather used when the rent wasn't paid

Different century, same gate standing tall

I'm still handing verses to the men at the wall

Chorus

The gate don't open free, it opens for a rhyme

Every scar I got's a toll I paid on time

Some men pay in silver, I paid in the truth

Same road, same weight, different kind of proof

Bridge

Now the young ones come asking how the gate finally broke

I tell 'em it didn't, I just learned to pay in smoke

Every hardship's a toll booth wearing a different face

Pay it clean with your craft or pay it twice in disgrace

I chose the first, kept the second in check

Wear my tolls like a chain, not a weight round my neck

Outro

So when the gate comes for you, don't beg, don't run

Bring your sixteen sharp as the day is done

Pay it once with the truth and you're paid for good

The toll only breaks you if you thought it wouldn't