In the ghetto where there are no airports, brothas are flying high over tall buildings

Smashing into clouds in a single puff/ behaving like supermen as they blow smoke like the wind

 

and while I may smile a lot and stand tall, I hate how the projects pose erect in the foreground, while below folks are losing their crown over the thrill of crack - quicker than sex ever - would or could

 

cause in my black neighborhood, former kings and queens walk with scarred knees because the high they seek is beneath their self-esteem, yet this high is sweeter than all the sensations of a wet dream, and nobody wins…

 

as boys who would be king dream of having lots of bling before making it past high school.  They pass by thugs whose pockets are laced with drugs, which on any given day will put food on one man’s table and leave another without

 

this is the ghetto; where a million authors can have the same story and the skyline gets colored in a purple haze that will linger for days, but never past midnight; so excuse me while I kiss the sky

 

and I don’t understand the ghetto.  I mean, I can’t leave and I can’t stay here another day, not with my hands tied behind my back.  So I take broad leaps over streets named after thieves only to land in the way of oncoming drug traffic, and it’s so pathetic how the ghetto has become an anesthetic

 

since we get high on trees with wet stems, in doorways and behind buildings. We get so high that we succumb and so now we’re numb to the idea that we are not free; so we don’t fight anymore/

 

instead we stay stuck on street corners conversatin’, hanging out windows procrastinating, and neither of us are creating solutions to our needs, not since we got our 40 acres of ‘get-high weed’/ but there’s no mule because it got caught trying to transport cocaine dreams under the nose of the feds, and like crooked cops we shoot up without using our head and nobody wins

 

…as the ghetto gets high on dirty heroine once stored in the basement of your local precinct.  There is no drug-free zone on the corner of Lenox and 1-2-5. So dealers and hustlers thrive on a strip of land reserved for a generation born positive-tox.  This is the ghetto/ and I see it hunched over all God’s children, sketching out little black bodies in white chalk on a black tar street/lined with houses

 

…and as I try to keep up with the joneses I see the ghetto get high.  I see the ghetto get so high, but never do I ever see it rising above the aspirations of its people…I guess that’s why we don’t have airports/