Chicago Public Correctional Facilities
By Lamar, aka Tha Truth
- What happens in neighborhoods where
- Gunshots and school bells ring in the same cadence?
- Where the wrong statements can get you suspension or shot cuz
- Detention is not a lifeline?
- Where lifetimes of quarterbacks yelling plays on Monday
- Have turned into women yelling' 6 ways to Sunday?
- Where argumentative students
- Have turned into rapists?
- Where the only way to escape this hell is extortion
- Disguised as expulsion
- Cuz Graduation is only known to some
- As Kanye's latest release
- If you wanna know the state of the streets
- Look no further than the schools
- The inner-city
- Insufficiently funded institutions where
- Inopportune inadequate students face insurmountable odds
- Where the gods of inequity
- Grave inevitably and injudiciously upon infamous individuals inbred from parenting in absentia
- And an increase in the price of living?
- What happens when giving your life for a particular shade of color
- Or 16 being the new age of mothers becomes so common that it doesn't even make local news?
- Where breaking the school's local rules and federal laws have become one in the same?
- Where a person with a gun and a chain can enter undetected?
- Unaffected by the lessons that teachers are being taught to teach
- How can one teach
- Build schools not prisons
- When I've been in both and I don't know the difference?
- What happens when the deaf ears needing to hear my message rejects it simply because I'm not rapping?
- I'll tell you what happens
- Not a thing
- Daily incidents tend to bring news cameras around but
- Sorta like Aaliyah said, no resolution is to be found
- These institutions are in the ground
- Intrusions are so astound as they
- Rise like dropout rates
- Open the flood gates like bombs over Bush's levees
- Causing a steady increase in student death toll
- I spit fire till nothing's left and my breath's cold
- But success and Steinmetz are oxymoronic like fresh mold
- I spit a story not yet told
- After LTAB 07
- Things shoulda been looking up for
- S-T-E-I-N-M-E-T-Z
- But see we be
- A white owned slave ship like BET
- The victory was not so s-w-e-e-t
- The documentary proves it's must-see-TV
- But nothing c-h-a-n-g-e-d
- And those final three letters
- Tell the story of the culmination of 4 years at that school
- 1 year for each leaf on the clover cleverly combined with those lucky enough to bypass this fate
- Myself being one
- One of only 3 black males from my division
- Who received a diploma after my 4-year sentence
- Adding another dimension to the list of insurmountable odds this sir has mounted
- We play blackjack with the hand life dealt us as society learns to count it yet
- Many people wonder why a lotta us don't make it to 21
- And many run from Tha Truth but
- There are very few ways left to run from what's right
- I don't write to give sight to the blind I simply write with the times
- But it ain't no sunshine in the Chicago Sun-Times
- So I spit these punch lines cuz one-time can't come find one crime in our public schools
- Worth publication
- And this republic nation that we live in bears heavy resemblance to the CPS system
- School lunch and vending machine prices rise like gas and taxes in corner stores
- George Bush and Arne Duncan both baby-sit meaningless wars
- The rich get richer while the broke get poor
- Prep school fights drop like Steinmetz test scores
- Probation nears phase 4
- Yet you question what we enraged for
- Severely under funded yet we wonder what teachers is paid for
- These problems go unnoticed, what you think we need a stage for?
- Forget a competition, what you think we Countin' Graves for?
- This past year
- We've buried 24 students to fatal gunshots
- Some of them were innocent
- Some of them were not but
- How can we not be weary for the future
- When it's getting gunned down and no one stops the shooter?
- What happens in neighborhoods where
- Gunshots tend to ring Louder Than a Bomb?
- Where moms leave tears on headstones like
- Poets on stages after unbelievable victories?
- Where block-formed memorials
- Hang on poles like plaques hang on walls
- Both equally going unnoticed?
- What happens when the sound of grounds and bullet cases replaces hand clapping and finger snapping?
- I'll tell you what happens
- Not a thing
- And if you gone teach
- Build schools not prisons
- Then please
- Show our youth the difference