Verse 1

I was born into exile, native alien in my own

Neighbourhood, my home in banishment

Where life’s script is scribed in neatly written wrath

In a book whose back cedes no answers

"In such an end, there’s little order to transcend,"

I thought as I pedalled Houston, beneath a sky salmon hueing

Monet’d as such by the flames of discontent fuming in what

Were now the ruins of be’rioted downtown

I look on these embеred properties, nеw ruins

Where fresh aspiration once roomed and now’s tombed

On the corner flexed a master pastor

Trying to dampen with sense the crowd’s ardour of warpath-grade:

“We can always take comfort

In how God looks down on our wild justice paved

That He creates all and only that which He understands”;

Then why did God make such a place, in which every thought straight

By an intensity of despairing feeling just riverbends?

Order, and what it takes not to abhore it

Means fuck all over Mars

Chorus [x]

I bet you never thought a corner boy

Would or could think like this;

The corner boys neither

I’ve been around the world, and yet

I’ve never gone anywhere

Verse 2

The preacher sang: “We, by fate imprisoned, hold the key

To freedom truest - for still in will, so free are we.”

I was reminded, see, of a man - no mere man -I knew well

He who nutted rise to me

My dad was a man who by that maxim ran that

“Certain men make their own rules.”

That maxim he tended til his life was ended

His blasting forecasted in the margins of his playbook

Surely that was not his meant-to-be, not the

Fruit he sugar’d up still from freedom’s tree

That he peeled so carefully, and, in his fashionless

Embrace of fatherly responsibility, passed to me?

Without both order and the means to transcend it

We are man and we are not-man

Doomed to mystery, chaos unabnegating, an unabating waiting

Maybe I take these ideas too seriously

Ponder too hotly the matter of my cream mixing through my coffee;

But is that not me? A milk-galactic bead, imprisonedly free

In a slave-copped crop’s world-cup’d, chaotic dark stream?

The preacher lowered his voice

And said “Hood maths, it’s the formula to freedom, one

Only those who’ve lived among the numbers can write”

Verse 3

The preacher said “Well, what is written?”

I thought, “Around here, nothing or a little less

To keep a record is to let that record test you

And the whims of husbanded justice wet you.”

The preacher said “Nothing is written

As Jehovah’s life-vine rap is headborn,” and my spirit

Was as is dope warmed; that smote dope

By which my people see their futures writ rote

If in such chaos as we live in, nothing can hold

Then the chaos cannot the passport of freedom ever ‘terpol;

Such chaos as we’re living in, it’s proof of nothing

But that we are free, of all things, from pre-determinacy

I look at what we seem to presume written-in

And then I look at the chaos of the block, in which is brewzing

The cream of chance; the chaos, it is hood maths

And the secrets of the universe are pursed in it

And the preacher said “Go! And preach the maths

Of the hood far and wide!

Tell ‘em Mars is right where I always said it was!

Right in these neighbourhoods!”

And over the block, over those steaming stores n shops

Over the river bend, over where others’ expectations of the degree

To which I can transcend end, over where my imagination can

Peregrinate, over Mars awaiting, where I can cut leather from comet tail

Fashion the dapper from cosmic fabric, and whip dye of the sun

I can faintly hear the words:

“Goodbye, my son”