Album: The Airing of Grievances
The first thing you see is the light.
Then, you focus on a man in a mask with a knife
as he cuts you away from everything you thought you knew about life.
Now you're in your mother's arms, wrinkled and wet.
You'll spend the rest of your life trying to hard to forget
that you met the world naked and screaming
and that's how you'll leave it.
In Riverside Hospital, on a July morning,
with a push and a pull - this is how I found out
I wasn't quite so invulnerable.
It put the fear of God in me when I heard my daddy say, "one mistake is all that it takes."
I ended up at Central School, 1993,
and met a certain kid named Sarim at the library.
He said, "they're ain't nothing about this place that's elementary."
I learned to play the guitar in the seventh grade
in order to convince everyone I was a renegade.
That's when I learned, in Glen Rock,
everybody calls a spade a spade.
I couldn't fool anyone.
I couldn't even fool myself.
I was just another book on the shelf, nothing else.