Stillmatic (feat. Lizzie Blue)

I was in the Bronx sacrificing doves
Baba would swiftly rip their heads off
Like Challah bread on Yom Kippur
By the mural of Fat Joe and Big Pun
Where I came to pay blood in exchange for safety
His safety, my legendary brother, Elegua

All the way from Washington Heights
Right off the Deegan
He found me
As if the 160,000 miles of streets never distanced us
I still don't know how but he found me

He hurried me inside his Range Rover, already high
Off the nitrous oxide pumping out the speakers
Listen, he said. It dropped today
He needed to be the one to deliver it to me
Needed to bear Witness
To be church for my monosyllabic prayer: Nas
This is how he loves, my legendary brother, Elegua

His search for me rippled the gray out the block
Out the clouds, out the clock. His ultraviolet light
Resurrected my childhood suicides that I'd done to
Subside. Giddy little dead girls ascended out the
Dungeons of my mouth and joined us

I rolled his blunt. He never let me smoke
For your own good
He'd turn the speakers up, paused, rewind lines
We zoned out. Listened through sunset and nightfall
To ethereal prophecy
Nodded our heads until our thorn-crowns spun off
Into glowing disks

I didn't know it then, that this day would be my favorite
A holy day. All was forgiven

With the smell of dead pigeons still fresh on my fingers
Ashe