Block Currency (Version 2)

Intro

Fourth floor window, radiator hiss and hum

Doss keeps a notebook, that's where the real bank comes from

Verse

Composition book behind the register, blue lines, my mama's name

Doss let us eat on trust when the check came late again

Said your word is weight, boy, heavier than paper ever was

Crossed out debts in pencil, never once in blood or cuz

He knew Renny's uncle, knew the weight his silence brings

Knew a favor owed in summer turns to ice by winter things

I was twelve when I first carried bread and eggs on his account

Learned the ledger wasn't numbers, it was who you could count

Every dollar that we didn't have got measured out in trust

Every debt got paid in showing up, in keeping promise or bust

Watched a grown man's hands shake, couldn't cover his own tab

Doss just nodded, wrote it down, said pay me back in grab

Bags for old Miss Coretta, shovel snow off Ms. Fran's stairs

That's the interest rate round here, it's sweat instead of scares

Fourteen years that ledger ran on nothing but our name

Hook

Round here your word's the only currency

Spend it wrong, ain't no bank gon' cover me

Trust is the only tender that we trade

Broke is a promise that you never made

Verse

Renny came home different, chain heavier than his smile

Started cashing favors fast, spending trust like it was style

Borrowed forty off my cousin, said he'd flip it, called it quick

Three weeks passed, no forty, phone stopped picking up the click

Doss stopped writing Renny's name down in the composition book

Told him find another bank, boy, somewhere else to overlook

Whole