Unfinished Lines

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Every word Ive ever written was a hand reaching through the dark

Every line Ive ever given was a way to restart

The conversation that we started when we still believed in art

Im standing at the finish line I drew upon the start

 

I been carving my name in the wall of a burning building, patient

Every artist ever great was standing at a different station

Baldwin wrote the fire next time and they still couldnt face it

Basquiat bled the crown and tagged it in the highest places

History dont honor prophets, only profits on rotation

So Im writing for the version of myself before the ratings

Before the praise arrived and rearranged all my equations

I was simpler, I was hungrier, before the complications

Of imagining an audience reshaped my observations

But I think about Coltrane, four years left, still in creation

A Love Supreme, he didnt know it, he was just calibrating

Every note against his breathing, every phrase anticipating

Something past himself, the music was a form of consecrating

What it means to be alive and feel the frequencies vibrating

Through the ribcage like a sermon that the room kept mistranslating

Im a vessel not a genius, just a signal propagating

through the static of a century thats desperate, suffocating

Waiting for a voice to name the thing theyve been debating

Im still learning how to answer that, still calibrating

Im still waiting on myself. Im still waiting. still waiting.

 

Sing about me even when my name becomes a stranger

Even when the people that I loved became the danger

Even when the story that I told becomes a fable

I just want to know that someone kept me on the table

 

Sing about me when Im gone

When the morning doesnt feel like morning anymore

Sing about me when the dawn

Is just a word for something I wont witness anymore

Write it in the margin of a book you barely opened

Write it in the silence of a grief you havent spoken

Sing about me when Im gone

When the morning doesnt feel like morning anymore

 

I keep a photograph I never take out, the grief would swallow

Me whole if I let it, so I keep the memory in the shallow

End of feeling, close enough to touch but not to hollow

Me entirely, grief isnt the thing itself, it follows

Its own clock, its own logic, how it narrows

Then expands mid-inhale, sharper than arrows

My mother knew this, wore it bone deep, dense as marrow

Prayed in rooms the daylight didnt borrow

Into, windowless her faith was iron and refused to narrow

Even when the ground gave out, I watched her follow

Truth through every hollow

Morning she was handed, pour herself into a swallow

Less throat of circumstance and never wallow

Never let the grief become permission to be shallow

With herself or us, she was the template I still follow

Now whenever pride is pulling me from something borrowed

Deeper than my ego, what she gave me isnt sorrow

Its a compass pointing true through every tortured tomorrow

Every honest thing Ive said has lived inside that marrow

Every debt I owe to love is oriented toward her

 

Sing about me even when my name becomes a stranger

Even when the people that I loved became the danger

Even when the story that I told becomes a fable

I just want to know that someone kept me on the table

 

 

Sing about me when Im gone

When the morning doesnt feel like morning anymore

Sing about me when the dawn

Is just a word for something I wont witness anymore

Write it in the margin of a book you barely opened

Write it in the silence of a grief you havent spoken

Sing about me when Im gone

When the morning doesnt feel like morning anymore

 

I been dying of thirst in a river isnt that the irony

Standing in the answer and still begging for a sign to me

Every truth I ever chased was in the library

Of my own experience, the chapters I was trying to

Skip past, too afraid to sit inside the symmetry

Between the wound and what it taught, between the fire and liturgy

Between the man I was becoming and the man I had to bury

To become. thats not a metaphor. thats the only victory

 

I used to think that death was something I could outwrite, outlast it

Icarus with a pen instead of wings, still flying past it

Burning up the closer that I got to what I grasped at

Turned the ash to metaphor and called that being crafted

But the sun dont care for metaphor, it burns at what its directed at

It burned the ones I looked up to, the greats arent resurrected back

MLK was 39, the mathematics of that

Are only abstract until your staring down 38 and contracting

Inward at the weight of it, ozymandias had the sand cracked

Around his monument while he still ruled, empires react

To nothing in the end, they just collapse, and those who carved it turned to artifact

Before the carving dried I learned that early. no, I take it back

Im still learning, still unlearning, still attacking and retracting

Every certainty I held, the universe is still transacting

In a currency I havent earned, the stars are still extracting

Meaning from my silence, light that travels without asking

Permission, light from stars already dead but still illuminating

Something in the dark below, thats how I see everything Im making

not a monument, a frequent frequency which is not permanent, just breaking

Into something that might reach a stranger who is still awake and aching

 

Sing about me when Im gone

When the morning doesnt feel like morning anymore

Sing about me when the dawn

Is just a word for something I wont witness anymore

Write it in the margin of a book you barely opened

Write it in the silence of a grief you havent spoken

Sing about me when Im gone

When the morning doesnt feel like morning anymore

 

And maybe thats enough maybe thats the whole negotiation

Between the fear of dying and the fact of our duration

Here, brief, necessary, incomplete, a small vibration

In a frequency too wide for any single generation

To contain, and Ive made peace with that, Im past the desperation

Every river finds the ocean without a map or destination

Every morning that I wake is still an act of consecration

Something holy in the ordinary, thats not compensation

For the grief, thats just the truth of it. But dont just sing about me, carry

Yours. the weight you bear is yours. the grief is ordinary,

holy, the way all ordinary things are ordinary

necessary. every scar a door. every door a library

Every library a version of yourself you hadnt seen yet, barely

Recognized, but real. All of it was real. And warily

Or boldly, you were here. you stayed. thats legendary

In its own right. Sing about me when Im gone. Ill do the same. Sincerely.

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