I’ve got hope… Now where’s my change

As I sat down searched my mental for my last remaining bit of sustenance

I stumble upon a memory of my mother when I was a child

My parents were a bit different than others… they never told me to be

A doctor, a lawyer, a surgeon or an astronaut but rather they told me to be afraid,

 Not of the dark but of my goals and my dreams for if I wasn’t I was thinking to small

You see the paths we choose to take in life aren’t defined by the successes,

The victories or our paychecks

Instead they are defined by the all-powerful ever-so-uplifting catalysts for change,

Our failures but alas, it seems in my generation that the saying if at first you don’t succeed

Try and try again has morphed into cry and cry again and give up once you believe

That your efforts are futile because you will never live up to the standard of white America

This has nothing to do with race and I find it a bit funny how

We came from the innovative ingenuity of the pyramids

But somehow we arrived at the point where

The only time a “real nigga” wants to speak with conviction

Is the moment before he gets convicted

Or how swears seem to pop up in conversation ever-so-much as if

It was okay to address our women as bitches, maybe

We are the uneducated buffoons stereotypes believe us to be.

It almost sickens me that my grandparents marched for progress because I know for DAMN sure

If the civil rights movement took began on October 16th, 2013

We’d be in a situation that only God could save us from.

I’m not saying that our wills aren’t strong enough, I’m just saying that we don’t

Don’t live like the kings and queens that we truly are because in 2012 roughly 7,000

African-Americans were murdered by people who look just like me.

But we want to get mad when a bi-racial man with the last name Zimmerman

Claims one life,

Our stagnation ends tonight!

So, put down your phone, go find a book, open it up and read!

Knowledge is what we need. Take a deep breath, let it all out, relax your mind

Breathe.

We are here to destroy, dismiss, and defy the lies we are told.

We are the clay of the Earth who will not fit Man's mold.

The power of a mind that looks beyond the goals

has the power to change the world to a degree that is untold.

The revolution begins now.

But keep in mind a revolution’s success rests in the power of it’s beliefs.

After all, a king without a crown is just a misrepresentation of itself

And to answer the earlier question of where’s my change…? Well…

It’s right in front of me.