Are you performing,
or making love to the mirror?
Spilling white gold,
chasing storms with beginners?
These cats ain't bombastic,
they're plastic bastards,
trash-can drummers,
bad actors in borrowed chapters.
We live by the code,
never bend,
never fold,
seen the heat turn warm hearts bitter and cold.
One minute you're fire,
got the city on watch,
next minute you're yesterday,
the calls all stop.
That's when dreams turn goals,
and sinners save souls.
But the streets don't care what scripture you quote,
they remember every debt
and every word that you wrote.
Every lie. Every boast.
Every bridge turned smoke.
They remember who swam
when the whole ship broke.
I'm from Saginaw Northside,
where survival was sport,
Madison Ave counting numbers
that never came short.
Adding up scars,
subtracting friends from the graph,
my life a calculator with a cracked screen and bad math.
The block taught division,
multiplied the loss,
every shortcut came taxed with a hidden cost.
Now I carry railroad steel in the curve of my spine,
a locomotive built from pressure,
still on time.
I'm an elephant
stepping on toes when I pass,
African bull bullying bullies,
snatching grills for a laugh.
My strength a mountain,
make a landslide from a stare,
they swing blades at the summit,
dulling steel in the air.
My will's a black river
carving canyons through stone,
patient as the tide while weak kingdoms erode.
Every scar a compass,
every wound a degree,
pain was the professor,
now the lesson is me.
We're all chalk marks in the rain
trying not to fade,
names on a wall that the weather
can't wait to erase.
So the question ain't who shot ya,
or who loaded the chrome.
It's whether your name weighs a ton when you're gone,
or blows through the block
like dust with no home.
The streets remember.
The rest get forgotten.
- VillyMarlou