Master told me one day that I’ll find piece in everyway,

But in search for the clue one thing I was bound to do—-!

I was bound by the chains of oppression,

Oppressed to the form that my commonsense escaped me,

My nature became offensive displaying rudeness and insolence

Excuses were my middle name following the slave mentality

That grew inside me from not learning how to navigateAmerica’s existing realms of society,

Being without was my reality,

Therefore the beast within me grew and grew and grew to replace the void in my life.

As generations before me fought for their freedom,

In ignorance, I would not submit but committed sins as I walked this beastly earth

The sun never shined in my yard,

Because my lot was filled with the debris of insults, poverty, and crawdads,

Yea, I was raised without a dad,

And the pain of missing father dad’s, father’s days, left me in dismays,

To the point that as a child I was called names that children were taught when they weren’t from the traditional family environment,

I was used as an experiment,

As the streets would talk to me, and walk with me in my loneliness.

No leaders were around to kick visions and plans with me,

But criminal minds lured me to plot and scheme and yes,

I’d learned new ways to cripple you as well as me.

But something within me,

Within the void that was inescapable spoke to me

I had visions of myself held in captivity

I had visions of myself hanging from a tree,

And as my ancestors whispered,

In my ignorance,

I drowned out the sounds with Jack and Seagram

As I displayed grimly grins with crooked raised eyebrows,

Plotting and scheming to come up and be up, yet I’d never rose up

Those voices in my head would say:

Keep your head to the sky

Keep your head to the sky

Alone, meaning with myself, by self, within the wall of my cranium,

Society strained the will of those who sought to progress

Then labeled and stigmatized them for carrying out the greed of men

The men, the men

The men that taught that flimsy negotiations were upheld with violence

The men that created social control to control your next thought, your next moves, your next steps,

The steps, the steps taken—irrationally due to the lack of the hierarchy of needs

Descending as one learn to master hate, the hate, the hate,

The self-hatred that causes mother’s to cry, the self hatred that cause communities to degenerate

Wiping away generations of human being bigger than any atrocities known to mankind,

Whereas kind is just a word,

And my Master began to open my eyes to the social ills that causes one’s to complain

While it causes others to stand,

And as He nurtured me I began to understand

I learned to keep my head to the sky

The more that I asked, he answers the questions “why?”

Master told me one day that I’ll find peace in everyway,

But in search for the clue one thing I was bound to do

I began to keep my head to the sky and my eyes in the books,

The books, the books where secrets are kept from those who regress in ignorance

Yet, I began to see this present paradigm as delusional

And as my thoughts began to illuminate I gain vision

The vision that my master blessed me with to see outside myself

No longer confrontational biting into the social psychologies called ideologies

No, Now I can see outside of this carnal flesh,

Developing love that is unconditional because I’ve been on both sides of the fence;

And the tracks,

The tracks, the tracks-flipped the coin that landed on tails- life held me back,

So I flipped the script instead of the coin and now my head is tight, mind right, the moves that I make–

Working in the trenches to awaken those who visions are skewed,

Working in the trenches to uplift those who were abandoned and booed,

Images that man created thinking that being better than is a form of competition

Stepping on the backs of those and crushing the hopes of those that once had a dream

I have a purpose and I’ve found that my past is my future and that was my clue—

To work with those that had done what I used to do,

As I found that my master is my servant and my servant is my master,

So today, I am the Master of my destiny,

No longer living in ignominy

And life is more than about me,

It’s bigger than you and I,

So, open your mind,

And keep your head to the sky….

© 2009 Frank T Williams

© 2011 revised: The Chairman of Spoken Words Music

www.chairmanofspokenwords.com