Donalja James

Greensboro, NC

Hear the pendulum swing as we sing the tunes of our forefathers
We have been gathering dust specs of shattered dreams
Collecting them like lightening bugs in hopes jars
To illuminate the path to a future
Our youth is suffocating in silence,
Longing to be reared and nursed at the suckling breast
Of this nation.
America spilling their dreams like the dead bodies
Dumped in the Middle Passageway
Each one reaching for a Fifty Cent piece of apple pie
Getting tipsy on BET, MTV, VH1
No clear channel sound bytes.
Inner city keeps crying for someone to hear
"DEF JAM, ARE YOU LISTENING?"
Mike check one two one two
I can't hear you
Lady liberty's tears stained the Hudson
Her blood clotting our society, why do we
Keep stealing heart beats
Bundling them in sack cloths,
Tying them with fear,
Shading our society with lies,
They are flying with iron fetters
Lacing their Achilles heel
We can't heal the keloids
Their brains form
Jigga, my nigga-the hard knock life
Just spelled strife on a young mind
We don't pump positivist into veins
Instead we aim cannons of poison
Mutilating our eardrums
Speaking on big buns, big guns
Getting less done while sitting in the son
Hoping for reparations
Most can't spell reparations
Define reparations so why are you
Asking for 40 acres and a mule
Rule #1help me see why insanity is
Plaguing "hip hop"
Stop and listen as we rock
Just a lil bit
And drop down and get our eagle on
Wrong
What happened to fight the power?
Now it's Get Loose, as we noose our future
With CD jewel cases
Mase is back and his message attacks, nothing
Lil Jon screams out (yeah)
Yin Yang twins "wait whispers songs of
Dope no hope always saying
Beat the coochie up
Jackin for beats as knowledge seeps
Like cups with holes in it
I am spinning (REWIND)
Music makes me lose control
No music makes me gain control
Bring back my hip-hop warriors
Our youth's psyche flat-lined
Fell victim to a rhyme stick up kid
Rode on a bass line skipped town
And found home in the Passageway
Someone tell King to rewrite the dream
Because my generation can't see that hip-hop
Just got "locked up" in the abyss by Ludacris
Help, someone please call 911, or 411, or 211
Give me information on poetry's husband
We once birthed revolution together but now
Our divorce decreed a bastardized nation
Little girls and boys looking for daddy to come
Home but he's gone on hoeing with Remy Martin
And them, as Foxy raps "Broken Silence" but our
Suspense is no longer a history lesson,
I'm a hustler, hustling gansta rap but none
Of that promotes construction only
Self Destruction
We've already destructed.
Hip-hop is locked up
The queen bee now the plastic seed
Rather the silicone Barbie
Eminem our white MC
Leading the path to insanity, 1 + 1=2
After the math is Murder INC
No one to lead HIP HOP
East/Coast West Coast
"It ain't no hope for the youth and the truth is
It aint no hope for the future"
Hip-hop stop committing adultery for the nightmare
Just hit my community, come home baby
Come home, come home to poetry.

Donalja