Mega Ran - A Poet lyrics

You see the great thing about this land Is that you can be whatever you please Whatever you do, whatever you need The world is your oyster, take it from me A couple of pointers real quick People will join ya just to exploit ya What a spoiler to deal with Most of your victories will be Pyrric And if you're anything like your old dad You gone grab a pen and notepad And jot down, what you got now Just to compensate For what you don't have Man, that's as good a toe tag, let me explain This treacherous game, I pray every day That you don't have The inherent desire to go rap All the pressure you feel from your homies Pain of watching them fade slowly And your heroes transform to competition Family mad you ain't rockin with em Advertising all you do to get tours Critics saying you should do a bit more Significant others secretly wishing you fail While cheering for you to get yours But hard times can't last I'm just looking out of stained gla** Half empty, i hustled all my life and I ain't tryna raise a Dame Dash Save some beans then chase the dream Stray from the chicanery Storms will come you change the scene Learn the game from A to Z A poet CHORUS I gotta tell you this now Cause when i was young i wasn't told All the things that you want during childhood Aren't best for you when you're old The grief stricken and the stoic The constantly misquoted You'll never know true satisfaction If you decide to be a poet, a poet I recall back when i was 19 Dating the girl that i thought I would wed Couldn't get her touches out of my head Till the day that on my heart she would tread A couple of years my senior, shorty even had a little son I loved him like he was my own, made a house a home To put it short i was sprung My momma thought I was an idiot Just for falling for a fast girl So on the day she stopped calling the crib It hurt me like a hundred hammer curls Sat up in my room sulking, wishing i wasn't so open Even used my last bus token to go to visit her crib in Logan Sat on her steps till she walked up - told me she came from the doctor She had just an abortion, and she didn't want me to stop her I had my whole life ahead of me, she didn't wanna complicate that I didn't really know what to say to her, I just had to take that Cause what would i do, drop out of school, to raise a baby when I'm one I wanted to say it but deep down, the words just couldn't be found So if you do get a chance, don't sway a sister or brothers dream Show em the whole palate, but let the child choose a color scheme CHORUS I gotta tell you this now Cause when i was young i wasn't told All the things that you want during childhood Aren't best for you when you're old The grief stricken and the stoic The constantly misquoted You'll never know true satisfaction If you decide to be a poet, a poet Tiny bit of humanity Blessed with your mother's face And cursed with your father's mind I say cursed with your father's mind Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot And looking away Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet? Why don't you kick and howl And make the neighbors talk about “That damned baby next door,” And make up your mind forthwith To grow up and be a banker Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter Or—?—whatever you decide upon Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts About being a poet For poets no longer are makers of songs Chanters of the gold and purple harvest Sayers of the glories of earth and sky Of the sweet pain of love And the keen joy of living; No longer dreamers of the essential dreams And interpreters of the eternal truth Through the eternal beauty Poets these days are unfortunate fellows Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way Or new things in an old language They talk abracadabra In an unknown tongue Each one fashioning for himself A wordy world of shadow problems And as a self-imagined Atlas Struggling under it with puny legs and arms Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load My son, this is no time nor place for a poet; Grow up and join the big, busy crowd That scrambles for what it thinks it wants Out of this old world which is—as it is— And, probably, will be Take the advice of a father who knows: You cannot begin too young You cannot begin too young Not to be a poet -James Weldon Johnson