(VERSE 1--- 0:21)
Once up a time, she had risen like a phoenix set to flight,
with a vision and a dream up in her sights.
But then life spit it’s venom and she plummeted to earth and cursed her plight.
She summoned up her might,
but once the dust and dross of life
had weighed her wings down, she couldn’t quite
muster up the strength to reach again
to them envisioned heights.
Deep within,
she knew she had in her to ascend,
but the pressures had attached their tentacles around her inner gems.
Dimmed of light, she settled in to what’s pretend,
to fill her mind with somethin’ more than just a void; it left her with an empty grin.
To fill the space of what coulda been,
she let her sins be the motive for the road ahead.
Soon she forgot that she could hold the skies inside in her eyes and comprehend
more than just the static and the antics of the famous and the make pretend.
Life became a sequence of just shallow ends,
but she felt that was what had mattered, so why battle with the trend.
Time was but a tattered fabric, but she saw no other tapestries that had a mend.
So with apathy she wrapped herself in her crafted mask, and that was that… the end.(1:15)
<CHANGE-UP>
As tragic as it sounds,
this patterns just a standard, it’s just average in the here and the now.
Collect your tears and hear the drowin’ spirits unaware of what’s profound.
We ain’t near to breakin’ through to soar anew, but we can start here on the ground.
<VERSE 2--- 1:33>
She heard the sound inside her soul,
an echo that had rippled through her whole.
It felt so simple, but it hinted at a depth beyond what she had known.
She had dreamt of it, but never thought about it more than but a moment,
but that was then and this now… it felt like home.
But what it was, was what she knew she had to know.
Ain’t no platitudes could uproot the seeds that she had sown.
A change of attitude alone was not enough to plant ‘em so they’d grow.
The system in its whole was sadistic, so how was she to keep afloat,
when the structures and the order of the globe
were controlled by the forces of corruption, greed, prejudice and biased egos.
Woah.
There was more to this than just sorta reordering some patterns of her own.
She was sure she had to throw herself into the storms, but it couldn’t be alone.
None of us could stand without the serried lines to hold us strong.
So she reached out to find whoever else
was trying hard to build somethin’ rooted in unity, justice and the truth we’ve needed all along.
And she found that she was not alone.
credits
from Breaking Past,
released April 2, 2021
Produced by Anno Domini Nation
North Carolina MC Big Pooh tells it like it is, detail for gritty detail, aided by L'Orange, Steve Roxx, and Apollo Brown. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 24, 2015