For Colored Boys Only...

For Colored Boys Only

 By: Alicia Williams

Yea I know him,

He used to be a star athlete unlike any other…

Slanging balls across courts and fields, calling teammates his brother…

Stayed off of the block until Uncle Sam got his mother, then crack met her veins and the two became lovers…

So the corner recruited him, took his speed to the next level, experience turned his mother’s sweet Angel into a dope boy devil…

School became distant, even when his coaches tried to save him, as money changed hands, so did his label…

So he calls himself a hustler now… dope boy slanging…

Slanging dope on his dope corner, in his dope hood, wearing dope boys with his dope boys, slanging speech like the words of a high school drop out but smarter than the king pin is…

New found dope dealer, young leader, reciting words from Malcolm and Garvey instead of Hova and Big...

Articulating thoughts of the life he lives, being paid by an audience of listeners who call cops to shut down his shop, organizing youth interventions to get him off of their block…
 

When all he’s trying to do is feed the hunger inside of him, watch the back of the boy who claims he’ll ride or die for him, feed the mouth of the woman who loves him despite of him…

No one knows what it’s like to be a boy of the streets, fighting for life on a block so hot that it’s not safe for this feat, witnessing genocide in a hood forgotten about by peace, slaving so his seeds won’t have to bop to his beat…

Dying for any dj to give him shade from this heat…

Yea I know him, I heard he got shot seven times…

Pronounced dead by doctors, but somehow survived…

Paralyzed from the waist down, to a wheel chair confined...

Rolling around the hood as a victim, all as a result of a life of crime.

Blessed with brains and skills unlike any of his kind.
He tried to make it, but his best talent wasn’t his rhymes...

Solely dependent on lyrics and dimes.

School would’ve been his outlet if he had just given it time.
Now this dope boy is a young man searching for a life to define.

Another story of a colored boy who could've made it, but went after the wrong grind.

MY BLACK MEN... OUR YOUNG BOYS NEED MENTORS!!! #FACT.