Sunday, September 14, 2008

Broken Body Lyrics - Tigera Consciente

I wrote this today on the train ride home after looking for an apartment for my mom outside of NYC to get her out of a battered women's shelter, after a break up with someone I love and care about, after two straight weeks of my first year as a full time maestra, after having just moved back home to NYC and in Wash Heights, after 7 years of metamorphosis...

Broken Body by Tigera Consciente (Beats by Beatnuts, feat. Dead Prez)

My stomach turned and produced anxiety
running up my esophagus into my heart
connected to some long distant artery,
an umbilical cord running into yours.
My thoughts,
mingled with your uncensored emotion,
exploding into my eyes, I cannot see
past where I've been and who I am
when it was you and me.
How can I profess this to be or not to be,
life has me questioning, asking, pleading,
crying, breaking,
tearing out of this enclosed space I call safety,
only to build a new one I like to call clarity,
but the membranes are too thick for me to see through,
feel through, stuffy inside I cannot breathe truth,
I must bust open and fly out into uncertainty,
ask a million questions why-
why am I me, and who am I to be,
in this, in us, alone,
stripped down
beneath the bone marrow my spirit sticks to
the earthly matter it is repelled to.
Stationing itself in perpetual complacency
or is it latency, dormancy,
does it not know what its capable of,
or are my bones unable to soothe
the aching screams of a speaking spirit?

What do they not want to hear?

Do they not want to carry the image of its destruction?

Who am I to be? What do I fear?
I run with the soles of my feet
numbed and calloused,
no longer feeling the lost breath,
the running heartbeat,
a race to death with a faint vision of life,
because all I can see is the concrete in front of me,
sun up and sun down,
hoping one day I would reach myself,
not knowing I might be carrying the object of my wealth
behind my eyes,
open and closed,
sometimes
catching a glimpse of life, sometimes
of its distorted reflection.
10 years,
15 years,
20 years later
my knees collapse,
shattered bones within tightened skin
sprawled across the pavement.
Perhaps that day I will feel the light speed
of my spirit,
light years behind my thoughts
yet over the finished line.
Perhaps then I would see
truth waiting for my arms to crawl
this broken body
back home.