| 6:05, Brooklyn Bridge:
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| Failed and tongue-tied
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| Body aching, hands shaking, bloody inside
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| Still alive
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| Sunrise like a pillar of fire
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| Still running like the static on a blank channel
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| Sunken to the bottom of the barrel of a gun
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| Braced against the railing looking straight into the sun
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| Like I was waiting for someone to burn a picture in my mind…
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| Like i could recite scripture off the lids of my eyes…
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| Fishing in the East River for a reason to die
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| Voices whispered in my mind, I believe they were mine
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| Another pilgrim come to find that the bridge is a lie, and
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| There’s nothing on the other side…
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| I was told to pick my battles. |
| This isn’t my war
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| My fight is with myself. |
| I’m leaving New York
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| Leaving my prayer rug in the apartment off Van Cortlandt
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| Caught in constant paranoia coughing someone’s jagged hallelujah
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| Buildings like a burning cross, withdrawal
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| The drive north, all five burroughs fall
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| Lizards listen through the walls, born into this funeral
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| News of war from city hall, subway station, FDR
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| Tanks and guards, riot squad, movement of the violent mob
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| I dissolve
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| Fall apart
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| Dusted in the dark, watching the war start…
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| They’re going to send us to the deserts of Mars
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| Where we’ll die or go crazy with our legs blown off
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| Don’t want to suffocate in space
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| While God and the State face off
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| Flags waving in the grey dawn
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| Better to break north
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| I was told to pick my battles. |
| This isn’t my war
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| My fight is with myself. |
| I’m leaving New York
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| I never found solid ground
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| But slept in a burning bed
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| There’s a couple landlords
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| With a bounty on my head
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| Never learned to bend my neck
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| Or to worship the dead
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| Metro card expired; |
| hop a turnstile and then jet
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| Was I a coward to abandon
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| The broken down mechanics
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| That crowned Biggie Smalls as the King of Atlantis?
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| «Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches»
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| The sea in which she vanished…
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| Lost Kingdom of Jay-Z and Def Jam Cannibals
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| Beating a dead break on the decks of the Titanic
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| I am it but I can’t fit
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| So when the sky fell
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| I felt like one of the guilty
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| With the populace in lockstep
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| Ready to come and kill me
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| Did Providence demolish the buildings
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| That rust and rot beneath the Hudson?
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| All of it came to nothing
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| And the devil’s still running…
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| And the devil’s still running…
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| I was told to pick my battles. |
| This isn’t my war
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| My fight is with myself. |
| I’m leaving |