A Mexican Shot Trying To Cross The Border
You Coulda Been Mandela (Rap Lyrics)
A Mexican Shot Trying To Cross The Border
Borders are
closed doors in hearts.
Mother Earth built
bridges between all
people, even paths through
the mountains, and the
idea of a ship by
the edge of the sea.
It is men who first
drew blood from the land
and said "No" to a
brother.
And now they are killing
people
for coming back into their own
country.
Life erased by lines.
Guns pointed the wrong way,
aimed by ignorance, instead of at it.
No, my friend, who today became a killer,
that line you drew in the sand is nothing sacred, not like the
body that lies at your feet.
Borders are only
closed doors in hearts.
Homeless.
Now they call him homeless
just because he doesn’t
have an address.
But he actually became
homeless
many years ago:
anyone is,
who does not have a room
with his name on it
in someone else’s heart.
All the time
that he lived as one of them,
in their midst,
seeming to be the same,
he was really homeless,
living without the roof
of anyone’s
understanding
above his head,
looking for life
in the garbage cans
of jobs
that only meant
to use him
and throw him out,
sleeping in the train stations
of buildings
filled with people
on their way to something else.
Sometimes, now,
in the night,
the flashing neon lights
of all the places where he is not welcome
remind him
of the old days,
before they called him homeless.
But, of course,
he was already
homeless then.
Until, finally,
the years of pretending
took their toll.
"Why hide what is?"
something in his soul demanded, at last,
dragging him away from appearances
and convincing him to be
honest,
to let reality
carry him away
from hypocrisy and
denial.
And that is how he came to be
an ambassador
of the truth,
like Jesus,
preaching to them
with his disaster,
which was only the revelation
of their own disaster.
Homeless.
Now they call him homeless.
But he was homeless long ago
even when he was one of them.
"But",
the most terrible word in the
universe.
I love you,
but -
I’d like to help you,
but -
I think you have talent,
but -
I’d hire you right now,
but -
This is beautiful,
but -
I would let you live,
but -
The spider web’s
so beautiful,
but it’s an act
of war.
When will the lovely
architecture
of cruelty
cease to mesmerize us?
When will we learn
to look past the
outer brilliance of what
we have created,
to see the inner darkness
that hides in it,
like a spider
waiting to kill?
They don’t know
the day you were born,
because then your people
were free, and they had
another sense of time.
But they know the day you died
because they’re the ones
who killed you
and in the new land they made
they kept track
of every
empty day.
When they won,
they lost the moons;
they lost the snows
and the month of thawing ice;
they lost the month of the berries
being born on bushes
and the month of the
sun’s greatest power;
they lost the moment of the coldest winds,
when snow came into the tepees,
and they lost the years defined
by a battle,
or an act of courage,
or a great vision
upon a mountain.
Seeing none of that,
they kept a record
of every blind day.
They gave a number
to every moment
whose value they stole.
As they destroyed the open prairie
with fences,
breaking it up into little pieces
and giving it away
to those who did not understand it,
so they cut apart
the open prairie
of a man’s life
with dates, marking, yet hiding,
his every day of being apart from God,
and giving those who wanted
to use him,
a way of finding him.
That is how we know
the day your proud spirit
was driven away
from the land
that only you,
and yours,
knew how to love.
September 5, 1877.
The day you died;
the day the
heart of the earth was broken.
The day the earth,
stained with tears,
vowed it would come back
through your people,
never forgetting,
in the season when the blind men
fell,
and your way
was the only way left.
It had to be this way.
To see what was needed,
you had to be different.
Being different,
you triggered their
instinct of self-defense.
The used all the tricks
of the free world
to silence you,
all the violence of the dictators
that their
system
could hide.
Rejection was their death squad,
poverty was their jail,
prejudice was their bayonet,
loneliness was their torture.
They let you walk on the street
as a way of pretending,
as a way of saying, "Who? Us?"
But the street led nowhere,
miles and miles of nowhere,
winding through a city
that, for you, was uninhabited.
Every door was closed
because of the way you looked,
with something unbeaten in your eyes,
something contagious in your heart.
Trained, like soldiers, to guard
the emptiness,
they did their duty,
they made your life empty
except for the
dream
that you bore everywhere, like a pregnant mother
about to give birth.
But to give birth
you needed their womb,
and they
would not let you have it.
No, instead, they locked
you in the prison
that no one sees,
behind the barbed wire of their fear
and the hard wall of their hate,
in the gulag of the free.
All you needed to be alive
was to give them something:
you never thought
no one would show up
for Christmas.
And your only gift has been
your pain,
given to yourself like a medal;
and your only victory has been
not ceasing to love them,
though your love is laced with
so much heartbreak, now,
that it is just
like pointing a gun at your head.
But it had to be this way.
If you were like them,
you never would’ve seen.
Those who have something to give here
are hunted down like dogs.
Antibodies swarm around every beautiful idea,
and then the streets come to collect all the broken voices.
In the night of course
(because Liberty needs her sleep).
But it had to be this way.
To help them you had to see;
which means
you had to be stopped.
Because here,
freedom is only for the blind.
I’m glad to be
ahead of my times.
That way, it’s true,
I catch a lot of punches;
but with each one,
I can hear the future
saying, "Thank you."
A was killed,
so B must die,
which put C next in line.
D followed C,
E followed D,
Till F cried, "No, not me!"
G’s revenge
brought tears to H,
which turned into G’s blood.
But not long afterwards
I left H
lying in the mud.
I tried to hide
but could not evade
J’s relentless search.
But as J killed I
in front of K,
J was soon lying in the dirt.
Next, for a time, K stood high,
too powerful to fell,
until J’s child grew up
to become the warrior called L.
And then K’s time came
as we all knew it would,
just as L’s must one day come,
it was understood.
Thus M struck L,
and N struck M
in the middle of the night.
And O killed N,
and P killed O
right in broad daylight.
But Q said, "P, you broke my heart,
you took away everything I had.
I’m going to make you cry,
I’m going to hurt you real bad."
And P could not survive
the wounds he received from Q.
Then R came up and said to Q,
"What you did to P, I’ll do to you."
R fulfilled his word,
which brought forth S in battle-dress.
Soon R was but a lifeless body
lying at the feet of S.
Then R’s son T, without a dad,
nurtured by his mother’s grief,
made S’s children orphans,
children of defeat.
But of course that only woke up
the tiger sleeping in U’s soul;
he forgot his holy book,
something in him lost control.
And since it hurts much less to hate
than it does to cry,
he shot T down in cold blood
and then he watched him die.
But though T had murdered S,
To V he’d been so kind,
so when V saw what U did to T,
it completely blew his mind.
So with the same gun with which U murdered T
he came right up to U
and said, "What you put T through,
you’re going to go through, too."
But then W stepped out
from behind the shadows of a wall.
"Take this V," he cried, "you killer,
this bullet will end it all!"
But it didn’t stop there,
no it didn’t end because
when W killed V he forgot to look
to see where X was.
And X took out W,
took him in a flash.
But Y was right there, ready,
and that day was X’s last.
And that left Y and Z,
in the front lines of the war,
each had a gun and bullets,
but said, "We need some more.
Weapons more destructive,
something to guarantee
what happened to all the others
will not happen to me."
And that is how it came about,
as Y killed Z in rage,
Y was killed as well
by a bullet he could not evade.
Yes, both of them fell down,
at the same time their life left,
and then there was only the silence
of the end of the alphabet.
Nin~os de Chapultapec.
It was hard for me
to see you.
Hard to know
where your blood
came from.
Hard to know
how many stars
you gave
to my flag.
But there you were,
frozen in stone
telling it to every passer-by;
remembered by a monument
that is just like the ones we have, up here,
except that ours
have left you out.
And for a moment - I don’t know why -
I felt fear,
like a swimmer
who suddenly sees the shape of a shark
in the water,
right beside him,
until I realized
that the shark was me,
and then, my fear
turned into horror, and
my horror turned into this poem:
One man’s victory
is another man’s death.
One man’s celebration
is another man’s mother,
dressed in black.
One man’s gold
is another man’s hunger.
One man’s fame
is another man’s oblivion.
The fallen
destroy all the causes
for which they fall,
because they are the greatest
cause of all:
not a means,
but an end.
Not a way of protecting something,
but something
to be protected.
One man’s victory
is another man’s death.
Today,
the hero children of Chapultapec
stand with angels
and grieving mothers
in the city
that is just as free
as we let it be.
The city
we gave back
after we killed its youthful
soul
on the slopes
of the mountain
that wouldn’t surrender.
Los Nin~os de Chapultapec
are silent
and yet
they say so much.
One man’s victory
is another man’s death.
Which means that
once a man steps out onto
the road of war,
all hope of victory
is lost.
You can’t win with a gun,
only kill.
It’s what the Nin~os de Chapultapec
told me, one day,
when I accidentally
looked at the other side
of the shining coin
in my hand.
And one more thing they said:
yesterday
isn’t over yet.
God, help me!
Sometimes I feel like a captive
on a runaway truck.
It goes where it wants,
it doesn’t care,
traffic lights don’t stop it,
painted lines on the road
can’t hem it in,
its power
makes the rules,
its engines
are the law.
Up by the driver’s window,
there’s a little icon of Jesus,
swinging wildly around,
as helpless as I am.
And I can hear the people outside screaming
as the truck plows into their midst,
I can hear the thud of their bodies
flying against the metal.
I see the looks of desperation and horror on mother’s faces,
some of them running away
with children in their arms,
some of them running forward
with empty arms desperate to be filled,
before they vanish
underneath the giant wheels.
I can hear people screaming and cursing after us,
like a miles-long wake left behind by the
passage of a mighty ocean liner,
the cut it has made upon the sea’s face,
following it, and leading to it, everywhere it goes,
as the truck roars on
into the night,
leaving the dead and wounded behind it
like something that didn’t happen.
And I know,
because I am a passenger on this
runaway truck,
that the hatred of those whose lives
it ruined
will pursue me to the end of time,
that their hatred is meant for me,
that my picture has been placed
upon the altar
of their rage,
and that they will forever see me as the truck.
God help me!
What can I do?!
I can’t stop the truck,
I can’t get out,
I just seem to be trapped here,
an endless witness
to the mayhem of the truck
that carries my name
down the highway,
representing me
to the world.
When I scream "Stop!" to the driver,
it is as useless as asking
a freezing night in the wilderness
to stop being cold.
It is like standing
all alone
in the mountains.
Who hears you?
When I say "I’m sorry"
to the people the truck is mowing down,
they see me looking out the window and say,
"There he is! The killer!"
And they store the image
of my protest,
which is too useless to see,
in the womb where revenge grows.
And the driver knows
how it goes.
Soon they’ll come looking for me,
which will make his runaway truck
be the only safe place left
in all the world; and
I’ll begin to call him father,
and worship the speed
of the giant wheels
that never let the consequences
of what they do catch up.
God, help me,
I want to stop the truck,
I want to get off!
This is not who I am!
Before I die,
I want the world to know
that I have been crying for its children
all night long.
I want the world to know that
though my tears have
not saved a single life,
neither has my hand
taken a single life.
I want the world to know
that I am ashamed,
that I hate to be riding in this truck,
that I want to put an end
to this nightmare journey.
I want the world to know
that the truck is not me,
it is my jail,
and my heart is broken
by its path.
God help me to stop this truck!
God help me to get off!
God help me
to find a way back
to the rest of the world!
You came
as fresh as the new day
like a sun shining
from far away
when it rises up
with its golden rays
to drive the last darkness
of night away
But then a man
asked you 'Where're you from?'
And when you told him
he said 'You ain't no sun
cause from where you say
no light can come,
no beautiful souls
just worthless ones.'
Don't let yourself
be underestimated
Don't let your mind
be exterminated
Don't let your heart
be violated
Don't let yourself
be underrated.
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
If you don't believe
you'll never be free
Believe in yourself
On that first day
you heard what they said
and you let it get
inside your head
like poison in water
that leaves the drinker dead
They closed your greatness
like a book not read
And you let the look
upon their face
go deep into
your heart and stay
they blew out the candle
of your inner faith
and you let them do it
and then you let them get away.
Don't let yourself
be underestimated
Don't let your mind
be exterminated
Don't let your heart
be violated
Don't let yourself
be underrated.
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
If you don't believe
you'll never be free
Believe in yourself
Don't be controlled
by their contempt
That's their secret
inner government
Don't be controlled
by what they found
They found what they wanted
and they want you down
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
If you don't believe
you'll never be free
Believe in yourself
One man heard your silence
and called you dumb
Another saw your color
and said 'You ain't the one'
One saw your anger
and began to run
Another heard your accent
and said 'The slums'
But can't you see
that their cruel blind eyes
their cold hearts and souls
that have no light
have no right
to define a life
Get out of their mind
let yourself shine
Don't let yourself
be underestimated
Don't let your mind
be exterminated
Don't let your heart
be violated
don't let yourself
be underrated.
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
If you don't believe
you'll never be free
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
Believe in yourself
Let yourself shine
Let yourself shine
Let yourself shine
You ask me why I don't work harder
Why I don't get into this working craze
Well let me tell you it's cause I got a life
outside of this rat race
Just take a look around you
look deep into everybody's face
and tell me, can't you see the pain
of people's lives just going to waste?
Survival pace, Survival pace
Got to get back to a real place
Survival pace, Survival pace
Don't spend it all here, learn to save
Survival pace, Survival pace
Don't let them throw your life away
Survival pace, Survival pace
Leave with something left each day
You ask me why I don't get caught up
in all this desperate energy
doing things to make somebody rich
when that someone sure ain't me
It's cause I got so much love to give
and I got such great dreams to reach
I ain't gonna let them burn my fire out
just to sustain my poverty
Survival pace, Survival pace
Got to get back to a real place
Survival pace, Survival pace
Don't spend it all here, learn to save
Survival pace, Survival pace
Don't let them throw your life away
Survival pace, Survival pace
Leave with something left each day
Some people will use your life
and turn your blood into their gold
But don't let them take your soul
God gave your life to you not them
You are your last line of defense
so remember friend:
When you can't just walk away
cause you got bills to pay
It's time to go into survival pace.
I know some people call me lazy
and think I just don't care
They don't know how filled my world is,
how many things are there
In fact that's why I don't shine here
in their stupid job of suicide
cause I got something to protect
and I got to bring it out alive
Survival pace, survival pace
Got to get back to a real place
Survival pace, Survival pace
Don't spend it all here, learn to save
Survival pace, Survival pace
Don't let them throw your life away
Survival pace, Survival pace
Leave with something left each day
Survival pace, Survival pace,
Leave with something left each day
You Coulda Been Mandela (Rap Lyrics)
Another night, another life,
a siren flashing like a knife,
a city dripping with the blood of crimes,
the ones they show and the ones they hide,
and a crowd of people’s gathered outside
to see the criminal in the cop car’s light,
a young kid who pulled a gun tonight
on a bodega guy, and said, "Go to the back",
and he grabbed this good man’s hard-earned cash,
but he left a trail, and they got him fast
and now his hands are cuffed behind his back
and the cops are bending his head down
so he doesn’t hit it on the car, like ouch!,
like that really matters when what he’s looking at now
is years of hell to pay in the pound
and the crowd is cheering the car door’s closing sound,
"Good riddance, now it’s a safer town",
and though I agree, still I’m feeling down
as thoughts and feelings in my heart abound,
which is why I wrote these words down
about the tragedy of a kid who let himself down.
I wish I coulda told you this before
and told you about another war
where you’re needed, so much more,
but now it’s too late to warn
You blew it big-time, let me tell ya
let me tell ya, let me tell ya,
let me tell ya.
You coulda been Mandela,
a warrior, my fella,
who really stood for something
like Malcolm loving Allah
or the Roman Brothers Gracchus
Martin Luther King or Cesar Chavez,
Cuauhtemoc or Zapata,
who didn’t do it for la plata,
they did it for their raza
But you let them steal your struggle
Couldn’t you see what was going on?
No, you fought the way they wanted you to,
and now you’re just another con.
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
All around the city and the world I see
slums and sorrow and misery
people in despair and poverty
captive people who want to be free
tied down by hearts of greed
waiting for heroes to break the chains
just like the desert waits for rain
but what can they do, and what can they say
when the heroes they’re waiting for lose their way
when the freedom fighters go astray
cause the system got inside their brains
and instead of saying "NO", they played the game,
what they should’ve fought is what they became
trying to be just the same
with the gold and the girl and the taste of fame,
and all the guts they had was thrown away
cause they used it in all the wrong ways
not to reach a higher place
but to try to win the poison race
and all I could say was "What a shame",
as the cop car pulled away in the pouring rain.
I wish I coulda told you this before
and told you about another war
where you’re needed, so much more
but now it’s too late to warn
You blew it big-time, let me tell ya,
let me tell ya, let me tell ya,
let me tell ya.
You coulda been Mandela,
a warrior, my fella,
who really stood for something
like Malcolm loving Allah
or the Roman Brothers Gracchus
Martin Luther King or Cesar Chavez
Cuauhtemoc or Zapata
who didn’t do it for la plata
they did it for their raza.
But you let them steal your struggle
Couldn’t you see what was going on?
No, you fought the way they wanted you to,
and now you’re just another con.
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
You coulda been Mandela
You coulda been Zapata
False Family
False Tribe
Everybody wants
to feel alive
False Family
False Tribe
How many of the
searchers died?
The wasteland did it
these cold streets
without a heart
without a dream
No world’s so full
of emptiness
hollow hype
and needs unmet
So they came together
to make a real place
but the wounds they had
hid the way
And like a stray bullet
they missed
How could a beautiful dream
end like this?
False Family
False Tribe
Everybody wants
to feel alive
False Family
False Tribe
How many of the
searchers died?
And the street warrior,
with his signs, is down
And the little girl
on the playground
And mothers’ tears
are all around
And a generation
is 6 feet underground
And one kid’s mind
can’t be found
cause what he buys to live
just makes him drown
like a river of hope
with currents that pull you down
And the courage and closeness
that were their goal
only made the bells
of the world toll
False Family
False Tribe
Everybody wants
to feel alive
False Family
False Tribe
How many of the
searchers died?
The wasteland did it
these cold streets
without a heart
without a dream
No world’s so full
of emptiness
hollow hype
and needs unmet
So they came together
to make a real place
but the wounds they had
hid the way
And like a stray bullet
they missed
how could a beautiful dream
end like this?
False Family
False Tribe
Everybody wants
to feel alive
False Family
False Tribe
How many
more must die?