Room with a View Songtext

von Brother Ali

One side of the street is Malone's funeral home
And the other side's a library
Try very hard to picture this shit
Walk through where I live at
Where parents are embarrassed to tell you they raise their kids at
If you need some half and half or an eight ball you could get that
Fuck with little Rodney and you get all of your ribs cracked
In a location where slangin' crack rock is not seen a fuckin' recreation but a vocation
And the sellers and the smokers are both pacin'
Got one eye on Minneapolic PD they both racin'
Three for fifty is the supply and demand
In the twin cities, American heartland
And they been busy, masterminds tearing apart plans
And hoop dreamers ballin' with blisters on their hands
With chains dangling from the rims
Pain strangles them from within
Until a belt around the arm makes the veins stand at attention
I try to block it out with a bed sheet that moonlights as a curtain
Cause I'm not comforted by red and blue lights when I'm hurting
“Mommy loves you”, yeah I knew but I wasn't certain
Cause the lenses through which she views life wasn't working
As a boy she told me, “wait for your father to come home”
I'm 24, still waiting for my father to come home
And some parents only touch their children when the whips brought
That's why bad kids to bad shit, just so they can get caught
And get touched; this growing up shit's rough
That's a big part of why we're so mixed up
Shit, we don't have bah mitzvahs
We become men the first time our father hits us
And we don't open gifts up
Sister Regina from across the street is beautiful
But for fifty bucks aint nothing she won't do to you
Used to be premium pussy, now she's used up
For that same fifty bucks she gotta do some new stuff
Whatever it takes to make you pull the dollars out
If you don't intervene then there's a day she'll turn her daughter out
Speaking of kids, I'm fixing lunch for my first born
I had the windows wide open ‘cause the weather's warm
That's when the greatest hits of Donnie Hathaway
Got interrupted by a drive-by shooting half a block away
Faheem was I the window, he didn't get hit though
“all praise due Allah”

(x3)
I see all this from the desk that I write my rhymes from
Pen starts to scribble on it's own, my mind's numb
But you could call me modern urban Norman Rockwell
I paint a picture of the spot well