Species Of Property

(album: Thumbs - 2015)

Everything is alright
Everything is okay, okay
Everything is alright
Everything is okay
Watcha gonna do with that beat
Watcha gonna do with that beat
Watcha gonna do with that beat
Watcha gonna do with that beat

They're telling me that the body is free
But we're the species of property
They hit the niggas with them hidden fees
They hit them niggas like a timpani
They telling me that my body is free
But we're the species of property
The popo still gotta follow me
While I wear my sneakers and a cotton tee
Everybody's gotta play to win
Lowered down to my shade of skin
They're trapping out at the Days Inn
And you're all thumbs, you're all thumbs
Decorative African skull
Full of olive pits and wine corks
Own my judge and high court
And you're all hung, you're all hung
You're all hung
Yeah, whoa

When you end up getting capital
The cobwebs in your shadow, gotta dabble with your nerve center
When your life is derated
And you're feeling isolated, that's when you become a bird letter
I'm a parasitic bitch
Eating asparagus tips while obscuring that money pit
You were still a televised veteran
Return to the center with your surname 'Honey dip'
This our disheveled, cell zombie shell
For that high society ride-along
But what do we own, I get deboned
So I bemoan that siren song
This rougish Moor than the underscore
Is inebriated at the oven door
With a sputtering core chanting
"Nigga we did it, nigga we did it"

They're telling me that the body's free
But we the species of property
The popo gotta follow me
While I'm wearing my sneakers and a cotton tee
They're telling me that we're not free
But I'm the species of property
They got my essence under lock and key
No no you're mistaken not me
Not me
No no, you're mistaken not me
Yes, you
Yes, you

My son asked me what a nigga was, and if I was one was he one too?
And what it meant to be of nigga-stock
How can we define this nigga that we resemble
Or are qualities lost in the abstraction of prayer
Did we become or were we always this, and what was this?
Where did the border between us and the world merge?
No one knows
Thankfully we do know the storms that forge the idea
The definition is uninterrupted
The nigga is the variable
The nigga is the unknowable
A mislabeled parcel of human electricity
Prehistoric in form, beyond time and essence
I wrote that for Baltimore