"DISTRESSED DISTRICT"

Introducing

Rasheed

[click name & follow link]

You see the problem I have with tourist Is that they are free to leave whenever they want

But Me, I am bound to this city By way of shotgun marriage

It is fused in my blood stream My veins look the same as the redline

Heart beats percussion Nerves pulsate go-go

I impartial to the sounds Footsteps have drummed

Many of solos on the artful grounds of U street

But you see not the sections left out by brochures,

Reroute you and yours to my city, minus THE allure

Come catch the bus with me

Hop on the W4 and out the window

see remnants of Darfur Atom bomb stricken As it glistens with gentrified sulfur

Come see the babies in jezebel attire

The Princesses and Pill Paupers Turn Protocol for Pregnancy Into that of stomach ulcers

See the doctor to get rid of it

See the roses yet to fully bloom In commute to school

Scraping though concrete like quicksand As bookbags are carried like back tumors

For it is rumored that learning is DEADLY

Hear the Medley of damnation Placed in the ears of scholars

as Articulation get mistaken for witchcraft

It seems Learning, is borderline sorcery So bare witness to the crabs in Nike Boots

Torturing the ankles of tomorrow leaders

Come watch the elders drunken with amnesia Forgetting why they struggled

Watch the village that used to check others kids be muzzled by fear

And then watch them turn around and give diagnosis with out prescription

Fingers pointed in the direction of afflictions, far more than the remedies

We are policed by robots, Their native tongue is machine gun

Shoot young, speak no type of compassion but are affluent in the language of Artillery

Until the point where Mourners become funeral connoisseurs

Pros at sitting in the second row As the glow of death shines truer

Through the stained glass windows

There were blacks in that “White”house before the Obamas

Come Tour the crack house, Where Pipes are passed like bills and legislation

Witness a fiends devastation As syringes fondle veins

Watch crack cocaine commit molestation and make it look like recreational use

Saved by NOTHING but Gods grace The Youth drowning in sexual transgression

If the Dow Jones rose as high as the HIV rate We’d be out of recession

Can you see the Potomac Gardeners as well as the Barry Farmers

Grow fruitless harvest Remaining project products No Crops just poison

“Weed killers” infectious in every way

And everyday I inhale the toxins

The Doctrine of the ghetto Tattooed on my eyelids In awe with my mouth wide

Neutral in midst of a civil war being fought between Uptown and the Southside

Fighting for a freedom they have no patent to

Too far gone to wake up and smell the apartheid Irrational in every sense of the word

And oh how it hurts to see one eye be blinded by the other

And oh how I sometimes long to smell sweet musk of concrete burning rubber

As the tire tracks of a Greyhound Bus write my Dear John Letter

onto the pavement of which I was raised

Combing through the road Parting ways forever Straightening kinks in my head

Formed from many days of no relaxer in this city of disaster

This asphalt purgatory With Carryout cornerstones

And Gentrified facelifts Hiding its ugliness behind its fakeness

But I love it like a childhood best friend, whose immature antics I’ve outgrown

But can’t seem to disown because we’ve known each other since we were little kids

And who needs peace when we’ve got years

There has been not a fear that I have yet to overcome here

DC in all of your ugliness,

I still will always love you…