Warpaint, Part 2 or To the Rookie at the Wall of Fame

You tell us we don't own these streets & tunnels

Not like we had much of anything to start with

Even with titanic talent, we are labeled

Vandal...misfit...sociopath

I let my name take ownership

I made my neighborhood a panoramic

That melted the frame

Make trains 3-D sculpture

Characters that follow passengers on and off

Gymnastics leaping off of pages

Make sketchbooks into  mixtapes, into concrete encyclopedia

Scrolls traded amongst monks, transmit style across town, over borders

You window etchers don't know Etch-a-Sketch from Escher

I heard your neighbor whooped your ass,

Not for graffiti on his garage,

But because that shit sucked

Now you want to play with the big kids

Audacity is a given

You gotta wreck shop like Christmas Eve

The only thing hot about your technique is stolen paint

Take this sidewalk chalk and get the fuck outta my face

Battling me shouldn't be on the agenda 'til you check the syllabus…

History:

Humans have obsessed over leaving their mark since cave paintings

How we discovered immortality

Geometry:

Determining spatial relation on approach to targets

affects your efficiency, originality

Phys Ed:

You have no stories to tell

If you aren't strong enough

Not to get jumped and robbed of your gear

Civics:

You are criminalized

Until you can make money for society

Philosophy:

Exist for this shit beyond your ego

Most times we paint for the choir

Step outside the sanctuary of self, take up a cause

I bombed "Mandela" when

apartheid's architects weren't hearing freedom

I tagged "MLK" as a cry for a deserved holiday

It's why we write memorial walls

It's why I scale rusted fire escapes

And onto the ledge of my own id

Repeating strokes of letters to arthritic perfection

Massaging the fatigue of craning upward from my neck

Twisting ankles chasing some loser like you,

caught going over my shit with dripping amateurism

Chasing fame only got me chased by the vandal squad

Heat from young'ns like you only brings assault charges

All I want is to rewrite urban blight

You make your name for namesake

but your shit is a field trip

My method is Timothy Leary

I leave a trail of tracers and paint fumes

Optical illusions turning midnight to high noon

addictive visions and the feeling that

fingers are useless unless depressing fatcaps

Salute veteran's days; STS ruled the lines

One car at a time, one rooftop at a time, for hours at a time

Until you stop trying to relive Style Wars and document yourself,

Until you attack walls like they spit on your mother,

Until you bleed paint from your fingertips,

Fuck tagging, show me that you can write