And these days I'm getting older, I watch the season fold itself like paper. The block don't sleep — it only dreams in sirens and the low hum of streetlights buzzing above the corner where we used to stand and waste the whole of a summer night.
Mama said the world would chew me up and spit out the bones, but I learned to wear the bruises like a crown. Every scar became a verse, and every verse a window that somebody climbed through in the dark just to feel a little sun on their face.
They want the gold but never count the cost of it. I count it nightly — count it in the faces gone, the friends who turned to memory and smoke. Pour one out and keep it moving; that is the only prayer I ever learned to say by heart.
Concrete roses, ash along the windowsill. I wrote my name into the wet cement before it dried, so something of me would still be standing when the rest got demolished for the glass and steel of someone else's borrowed dream.
Time is a hustler too. It takes its cut and leaves you wondering where the morning went. So I press record at four a.m. and bottle up the quiet, then ship it out to everyone who ever lay awake and felt the heavy weight of being young.
If you can hear me, then you already know. There is no map for where we come from — only the rhythm in the chest, the breath between the bars, the part of the song that never reached the radio but still lives in the basement of your soul.
Some nights the city is an open mouth and I am just a word it hasn't said yet. Other nights I am the whole sentence. Either way I keep on writing, because silence was never an option for a kid who had to shout just to be believed.
Heavy is the head, but heavier still is the silence after the applause dies down. I went looking for myself in every city and found him waiting in the mirror back home — patient, unimpressed, asking what on earth had taken me so long.
We turned the pain to platinum and the platinum back to bread. Fed the block, fed the dream, fed the version of us that the world swore would never make it past the gate. Now look — the gate is ours, and still I leave it open.
Love is a frequency the cynics cannot tune into. I broadcast it anyway, low and steady, a lighthouse built of bass for anyone still out there sailing through the storm with nothing but a hook and a half-remembered chorus to hold onto.
Tell my story like you actually knew me, even the parts that don't rhyme — the stumbles, the long nights, the pockets full of melody and nothing else. That is the realest gold there is, the kind that they can never take or counterfeit.
One day the lights go down for good and all that is left of you is what you managed to give away. So I am giving all of it — the verses, the silences, the truth wrapped up inside a beat. Take it. It was always meant for you.
And when the season folds again, I will be the warmth that lingers in the page, the voice beneath the static, the April that refused to sit and wait around for spring. Press play whenever you are ready. I'm right here. I never really left.
Until then, keep the volume up and the doubt turned low. The world is loud, but so are we, and the song does not end just because the room goes quiet — it only waits for the next pair of hands brave enough to start it over.