Some people keep a diary on what they do, see and feel. There are love-life diaries–and there are some famous prison diaries when people who have been locked down take moments to capture that prison shit on paper. I am a poet. My poetry is ’bout da streets that I know so well. That’s da shit I rap about. That’s what I write about. It’s my ‘Street Diary.’
When I defended my dad from the misguided that were attacking him it was because he reaches across racial lines to live life with affection and love. I used some strong language to make my point. Hip-hop is poetry but it is not nursery rhymes. You feel me? Russell Simmons encourages me to be better and I am trying to do just that.
So, you know I have decided from here on out, I am gonna keep blogging. I ain’t fronting. I’m Standing up for my dad who helped me to stand up for myself and for my generation.
I learned a lesson about the importance of speaking up right after I got shot two different times in the same year. It was one of those times that I got shot by some NYPD detectives on New Year’s Eve night in 2001 on da streets of Brooklyn.
Back then I was a grown man at the age of 16. My baby mother had just given birth to my little daughter. I was out there trying to make a life for my family. Even though I was wrongly shot by the cops, they put me in jail and said I had something to do with a cop being shot. Russell bailed me out and got me a good lawyer. But you gotta know my case was like ten thousand other cases that were later dropped or dismissed.
When you take a bullet, it’s like painful as hell but my desire to live beyond those unexpected moments of suffering turned that fucking pain into an authentic ability to give poetic expression to the staccato heart beat of life caught in the fire of poverty. Yet struggling to reach a higher level of thought where I can see my dreams come true without having to give up my life for something self-destructive.
You know what I mean? Hip-hop is about empowerment…self-empowerment. It’s about real change. I’m a homie breed. I’m da realist, nothing less. At 24, I still got the mic. I got the pen. Now I am letting you into my ‘Street Diary.’
