I mean, the voices, they ain’t too bad. They come and they go, you know? Sometimes, they just come when I don’t even ask for ‘em. They tell me to do things. “Jump in front of a train”, or “jump in those tracks.” Sometimes it’ll be “jump in traffic,” “run into that car.” Or, “pick a fight with that guy and see what he’ll do to you. Buy a gun, buy some poison, hang yourself, slit your wrists, jump off this building, or out this window.” Mad random wild shit. But then I hear this little whisper in the back of my head that be like “nah, don’t do it.” I think that whisper is God, or maybe my moms or something. The voices, though, they getting more dangerous now. Like, hurt that baby or smash that kid’s face in. The faces, they look like how mine used to look, I guess…free. And you see the families, being all happy with their children and they’re playing and laughing. They’re holding them like it’s gonna be that way forever, and you just wanna smash that dream up with your knuckles. Cause I start to feeling like that ain’t gonna be for me. That I’ma have to schedule visits and child support and I don’t want that. I’d rather be dead. But then I think of, like, that kinda burden. She don’t need that, my little one, she don’t need that. Cause she ain’t no burden. She’s a blessing. A beautiful blessing. I ain’t know blessings can make you wanna hurt ya’ self.

I used to wonder why, you know, folks, they get all wrapped up inside of themselves, kinda like a cocoon, and they go on and they do things we wouldn’t have ever expected of them. But then you start asking what did they expect of themselves, you know? And did they ever see that come to fruition? The world has a real peculiar sorta way of just breaking you down, down, so far down, and hard too. Like the world ain’t really giving a fuck about your lost dreams or missing pops or rent due or debt or student loan shit or baby needing diapers and a roof over her head. At the end of it all, the world ain’t keeping tally of all the good you be doing, so I think folks just be like fuck it, if they don’t care why should I care? You get to a place where the nerves snap, man. They just do. Whatever them synapses is called that regulate and modulate brain functioning or whatever, that keeps us from doing wild crazy shit; like the right and the wrong and the good and the bad? I think in some folks that shit just snaps, because the weight of the world gets way too heavy to bear.

Motherfuckers shoot up schools and churches and movie theaters and all types of wild shit and you be like what is humanity come to? It ain’t come nowhere. It been like this. Cats had gladiators in amphitheaters fighting to the death and folks was coming out to see it. Motherfuckers was hanging niggas butt ass naked and folks would be out there having a picnic, eating cucumber sandwiches and shit. Fam, we dropped a bomb on a whole city…a whole city. We was built like this. We fought for our independence by throwing motherfuckers and some tea off a boat. Cats was wild ruthless back in the days but we ain’t have no smartphones, none of that. The whole first book of the Bible was God killing off mad folks and putting a dude on a boat, and a brother murdering his own brother. Like, this ain’t no make-believe. We been killing. Some black reporter dude ran up on a white newslady and the camera man and just opened fire, and then he live tweeted it. Like, shorty was in love; cameraman’s fiancé was watching the whole shit. Like, what possess somebody to do some shit like that? But then I be thinking, I don’t know. I ain’t condoning it, but I dunno what buddy had been seeing that brought him there. That wasn’t no overnight shit. That was some years of some other stuff festering, and then somebody push a wrong button and then boom, Hiroshima. Hiroshima ain’t happen overnight, man. Shit was a powder keg. Shit like that don’t just happen. It just be happening in little fragmented pieces. We just don’t be seeing it until after the bomb lands.