For what
What you buy with your 40k bonus?
A new mustang!
Boy you must’ve forgot the birth pains
That your mother felt when she heard her little black boy would deploy.
Worried that in the Vietnam jungle he’d be slain.
God must’ve put a drain in your heart
And made you neglect all those nights of hunger.
Now you let the United States military eat away at your stomach every time you must swallow the truth on leave.
You can’t leave life behind.
Your nieces only grow older,
Your high school sweetheart can’t wait forever
And your ribbons only look good in pictures.
You let them eat away at your stomach.
Until
At 3 am you’re convulsing from stomach ulcers and deploying the demons from the pit of your stomach.
Like the United States Army deployed you in 07.
You were their demon.
They caught you on the football field and made you forget about the NFL.
You were their nigga at night in the Sahara desert; it felt like when you were being shot at.
It felt like Moses had parted a Red Sea of blood when you first started convulsing from your first ever bullet wound.
Your bowls all left you, cleaned out!
Redeemed from your first kill.
He had the potential to kill you;
But you got away.
You confirmed so many kills.
I bet you could only forget those who died next to you.
Because you ate with those people.
Slept in the same tent as those people.
Bathed in the same quarters
You were brothers and most of them were
Until a loose cannon forgetting that American men bleed just like they do.
Decides that tonight is the night he takes his frustration out on your whole platoon. from his 12 year old sister being gang raped by American forces coming to spread the democratic message.
You walked out that night.
Black skin hiding in the African desert you felt it that night.
The same way that Joseph saw Pharaoh’s dreams
You felt a resurgence: a rebirth
Blood of Jesus all over you as you said those prayers your mom taught you over that phone.
You had to break so many chains that night.
You had to remember that you were a nigga that night.
You had to remember that this life wasn’t going to wait for you
that night.
You had to realize that a single mom did not teach you how to become a man.
But the American shackles on the black man taught how to be a slave.
You had to learn that you reborn in Christ is a whole new creature made free.
You had to learn that the blood of war and Jesus are both shed synonymously.
That Christ came to save those in need.
You learned that the spirit can raise 20 years of mistakes out of you,
And at 28 you finally became a man,
That night.
