Chuck D said John Lennon was killed today
and I miss Pac and Big more than ever
I am Holden Caulfield watching hope break in the stalls of public bathrooms
I am Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth reminiscing over the fallen body of b-boy
Trouble T-Roy and dying hip-hop birth sites falling wayside to the pounding beats
of green-fisted real estate agents and the hard crack rock drug wars american wages
on her children creating culture with turntables
we have been here before
and I want Scott La Rock back to break up all this violence
I want Big L to throw a peace sign up in the air and DREAM
and Ramon and all the other graffiti artists killed in the line of their calling
to come back and bomb the World Trade Center
with the biggest streaked wildstyles the sky has ever seen:
a mural for the forgotten spray painted on the clouds
a gold chain cast across the sun
a single shell toe held up in the air
it was Jam Master Jay who introduced me to the culture
who soothed me over the bridge of whiteness and rock
it was his cool lean arms wrapped around chest / head back
in black fedora / no laces in his adidas / he stole electricity
to light the block parties / reparations / for all the stars exploded
before he could pay the last song they requested / he'd send shine
beams on vinyl / into the distant homes of the sun starved
and let us bask in his light scratching scarce sounds / found
digging the landfills / of america's sonic consciousness
it's not bad meaning bad but bad meaning
it's not bad meaning
it's not bad meaning
it's not
Kevin Coval
Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica), EM Press. Copyright 2005 by Kevin Coval; used with permission of the author.
