Teach Black Boys How To Cry

Dodging bullets, watching my back, underrepresentation, overexposure. Indignation, disrespect...they building a new stadium, so they raising my rent. Reading newspapers about congressional decisions to deepen my debt. The Pastor stay demanding my repentance, since I was four, he knows I've got a short life expectance, plus I'm always three strikes from a life sentence. Diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes. My home had no backbone, flexible spine from playing limbo with the poverty line, see if I lose, I choke. Living in a police state, beat cops provoked equals a beat down invoked by ancestral habits carved in DNA. Paranoia, disillusion, misinformation - posing as my elementary education. Economic inflation, uncle tom role models, wanna-be gangstas...and real gangsters. Chains that hang low turned noose, turned leash, species turned beast, then turned loose...on an unsuspecting youth; watch as I, without a father figure, try to figure fathers who tell sons, "why bother nigga?" Live that life, and don't shed a single tear. Then see if you dont loot a footlocker in a blackout, or spaz out when someone looks at you the wrong way..be that mad - all day, and don't do shit about it. Just try it...and see if yo' ass don't start a riot.