[Hook]
You can paint a picture of my outcome
Still won't make a difference where I come from
You can walk away from me
There's nothing more to say to me
I'm father figure skating
Try to tell me something cause it's different now
But let me count the ways that I can show you how
You got a lot to say to me, but really you just playing me
[Verse 1]
Born 11, 1976
In the midst of conflicts
Me the quick fix from the
Potential tomb to the womb to the emergency room
Escaped doom, soon to bloom
Even though my pops plan could never defeat us
Cause between us, when I was a fetus
Was greeted by Jesus
Introduced me to a world that turns and burns
Where hate is the worm that spreads the germ
Never concerned cause I made it through the pregnancy term
Learned at an early age that you must stand firm
So I breathe, stretch, bless the Lord
They used a double-edged sword to clip the cord
It was my first taste of pain
With much more to come
Screaming while they extract the mucus from my lungs
With me, the new addition make the family complete
We made it home in a stolen car seat
It's all sweet and calm until your mom gets beat
Call it common occurrences, doomed to repeat
Cause home was a prison and a nursery combined
We learned how to deal cause we never could malign
Cause daddy was a misfit, chasing crime
My mom had to be a father at the same time
But when you live by the gun, you end up getting shot
So you can rest in unrest, pop
[Hook]
[Verse 2]
Skate to California state after age 8
Now with a stepdad everything's great
I start to get attention for the first time
And in the public he fronts and tells everyone "He's mine"
We develop a kinship, a father-son relationship
But if good things often come to an end, you get stripped
We got a new addition to the family
And since he's the seed from my stepdad's tree
He found no obligation to invest in me
The best in me considers daddy's testing me with lessons of letting me
Feel withdrawn, as time moves on
We found it very difficult to get along
So it was better to debt instead of letting him get me upset
Cause running away begets tryna forget
I met the beat and felt complete
The unique sense of concrete deletes all these feelings of being weak
The past pain was forgot, cause hip hop was everything my pops was not
It was life, love, a place to build
A place to get acknowledged when I flex my skill
It was a platform, a stage, a place to shine
A spot of acceptance to say "He's mine"
See, hip hop's the place where it all began
It helped me father figure skate around a stepdad scam
[Hook]