Listening Instructions

Please consult the following instructions when listening to the track you’ve selected:

STEP ONE

If you do not have
The largest whitest white tee
The longest, sky-as-blue-as-the-lies-they-preside-over-in-a-Norman Rockwell-painting denim jeans,
The one with the leg as wide as the grimace on your meticulously rehearsed mean mug?
Yeah see, if you don’t have some of those you are not ready to listen to this song.

If your Reebok headband does not match your Air
Force ones do not match 
Your crisp cotton towel flowing from your back pocket,
Its dove-like wings sprouting behind you
Forcing anyone even in your same zip code to have no choice but to acknowledge,
Truly,
How fly that ass is

Then you are not ready to listen to this song.

STEP TWO

Grab
A toothpick
And chew on it.
Taste its wood pulp as it dances and leaves its splinters across the pink of your tongue.
You make sure you savor that woody earth as it fills the crevices of your molars, now.
Chew on this for no reason.
Chew on this because you were taught,
Because you watched as your older siblings
And their homies
Forging their instruments in their mouths
To sing a song that Homer would never be able to commit to memory. 

Make its edge
Once sharp, a weapon
Flat in your mouth,

Now transformative.

STEP THREE

Find
A table.
A good, sturdy one should do.
You should not know what material this table is made of.

Gather
A multitude
Of your niggas.

I do not mean friends, or relatives, or anything other
Than that
Because for this song
You will most certainly need your table
To be surrounded by your niggas.

STEP FOUR

Select
A vice
A power
A privilege
A gallery of unwon
Spoils;
A mask to wear.

Find this mask and feel it pull over your whole face.
It’s scratchy wool licks at your cheek bones
Smell
Its cool, not quite damp fibers
As you unroll this mask
From your tufted crown.

If you are fortunate, your mask will have slits to peer through,
But you are almost certainly not fortunate.

Accept the taste of this mask as its fibers dance through your pursed lips and 
Plunge deep 
Expanding within your lungs.
Your breath sustains this wool
You breathe with this mask, you think.

This mask will smell of smoke
Of pure, untrifled snowflakes
Of waiting at the bus stop for the 40 that you know won’t show up until it’s good and ready
And even then give it another five minutes.

Your cheeks harden in this mask
Your Black skin roughens to the touch
You are hard.
YOU ARE HARD
YOU ARE COLD
YOU A BEAST LIL NIGGA

BOOM

SO SLIME NOT EVEN YA DADDY CAN WIPE YOUR NOSE

BOOM.

CAN’T NOTHING KILL YOU.

STOP YOU.

BOOM

BOOM.CLAP clapclap

BOOM boomboom

CLAP clapclap

GrinDING

“You know what I keep in the lining
Niggas better stay in line when

They 
See
A
Nigga
Like
Me. Shining.”