A Poet

You see the great thing about this land
Is that you can be whatever you please
Whatever you do, whatever you need
The world is your oyster, take it from me
A couple of pointers real quick
People will join ya just to exploit ya
What a spoiler to deal with
Most of your victories will be Pyrric
And if you’re anything like your old dad
You gone grab a pen and notepad
And jot down, what you got now
Just to compensate
For what you don’t have
Man, that’s as good a toe tag, let me explain
This treacherous game, I pray every day
That you don’t have
The inherent desire to go rap
All the pressure you feel from your homies
Pain of watching them fade slowly
And your heroes transform to competition
Family mad you ain't rockin with em
Advertising all you do to get tours
Critics saying you should do a bit more
Significant others secretly wishing you fail
While cheering for you to get yours
But hard times can’t last
I’m just looking out of stained glass
Half empty, i hustled all my life and
I ain't tryna raise a Dame Dash
Save some beans then chase the dream
Stray from the chicanery
Storms will come you change the scene
Learn the game from A to Z

A poet

CHORUS

I gotta tell you this now
Cause when i was young i wasn’t told
All the things that you want during childhood
Aren’t best for you when you’re old
The grief stricken and the stoic
The constantly misquoted
You’ll never know true satisfaction
If you decide to be a poet, a poet

I recall back when i was 19
Dating the girl that i thought I would wed
Couldn't get her touches out of my head
Till the day that on my heart she would tread
A couple of years my senior, shorty even had a little son
I loved him like he was my own, made a house a home
To put it short i was sprung
My momma thought I was an idiot
Just for falling for a fast girl
So on the day she stopped calling the crib
It hurt me like a hundred hammer curls
Sat up in my room sulking, wishing i wasn’t so open
Even used my last bus token to go to visit her crib in Logan
Sat on her steps till she walked up - told me she came from the doctor
She had just an abortion, and she didn’t want me to stop her
I had my whole life ahead of me, she didn’t wanna complicate that
I didn’t really know what to say to her, I just had to take that
Cause what would i do, drop out of school, to raise a baby when I’m one
I wanted to say it but deep down, the words just couldn’t be found
So if you do get a chance, don’t sway a sister or brothers dream
Show em the whole palate, but let the child choose a color scheme

CHORUS

I gotta tell you this now
Cause when i was young i wasn’t told
All the things that you want during childhood
Aren’t best for you when you’re old
The grief stricken and the stoic
The constantly misquoted
You’ll never know true satisfaction
If you decide to be a poet, a poet

Tiny bit of humanity
Blessed with your mother’s face
And cursed with your father’s mind

I say cursed with your father’s mind
Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back
Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot
And looking away
Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond
Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet?

Why don’t you kick and howl
And make the neighbors talk about
“That damned baby next door,”
And make up your mind forthwith
To grow up and be a banker
Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter
Or—?—whatever you decide upon
Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts
About being a poet

For poets no longer are makers of songs
Chanters of the gold and purple harvest
Sayers of the glories of earth and sky
Of the sweet pain of love
And the keen joy of living;
No longer dreamers of the essential dreams
And interpreters of the eternal truth
Through the eternal beauty
Poets these days are unfortunate fellows
Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way
Or new things in an old language
They talk abracadabra
In an unknown tongue
Each one fashioning for himself
A wordy world of shadow problems
And as a self-imagined Atlas
Struggling under it with puny legs and arms
Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load

My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;
Grow up and join the big, busy crowd
That scrambles for what it thinks it wants
Out of this old world which is—as it is—
And, probably, will be

Take the advice of a father who knows:
You cannot begin too young
You cannot begin too young
Not to be a poet

-James Weldon Johnson