The final track on Mike Ladd’s “Welcome to the Afterfuture” is a gorgeous spoken word piece reminiscing childhood and the past, examining spirituality, and honoring those murdered by police brutality, lamenting their loss while calling for justice
It's all confused and beautiful
Like Cambridge Mass
Like Roberts upon Roberts and Sylvias and Bushes and pawns and projects and steeples
Sweet Ivy with acid leaves
Like chips and the air is sharp
And at 16 I saw the snows turn purple at the top of the world
And the green carpet of the plateau went so warm the sight alone could feed children
Old men and women pray with their whole bodies in dust, length by length around temples
And I couldn't play basketball for shit so my friends made me toss a glass bowl in the dark to test my coordination skills
The sting on my knuckles when it slipped through, everything slipped and dropped Boston style[?]
In the Himalayas five boys and a pound of ghee for Ramadan omelets at 4 AM with Reyhan
Coaxing God in my ears, the mullahs' song bouncing off mountains, down to plains and off to horizontal stars
I don't wear saffron
And I won't cheat my feet out of a pair of soles
Kraft macaroni and cheese all week long tastes better in the company of cousins
Uncle Jimmy joking about spaghetti and peanut butter
His Laz-E-Boy all duct taped and plastic
Luke and Laura learning how to get it on in front of my little face while I'm waiting on Easy Reader
All I know is when it’s cold, hazy, and you're high
The Great Zimbabwe looks as if it's being born in this morning
Stretching out of the mists like the world was an egg to emerge from
That keef, and fez, and the wet of two lovers making room for me
Allow we to be cradled in folds that should be eternal
If I could be cradled in a boat of wombs within a womb
Odysseying through the worlds
I'd be there now, fully drenched
All I know is Jesus, Vishnu, Mohit, Taurus, Osiris, Odin, Muhammad all wait in line for seconds just like me
That we are put together by masses of eternal trinkets of matter from the cosmos in the bathroom
And that they disappear and reappear like worlds between matter
That mountains, seas, and sidewalks won't justify this
But they will serve
Serve like universes
Somehow bullet holes in steel doors look like a collection of constellations trapped to catch the wrath of idiots
And we are the size of constellations in the path of wrathful idiots
And all these heroes we will map the sky with come across arcane next to off duty demons in denim
And you would think that Cambridge would finally buckle under its own ego
That the Himalayan stones would melt and somehow drown the right people
That Shona ghosts would rise and fly vengeance
That the very matter from every crossed path would turn resolute and shatter themselves for justice
(Instrumental Interlude)
But no, the world is too beautiful for that
Too beautiful to let go pain
Too confused to leave out the stain
But if days are numbered, the day will come, and they will serve
Feb. 4 ’99 (For All Those Killed by Cops) was written by Mike Ladd.
Feb. 4 ’99 (For All Those Killed by Cops) was produced by Mike Ladd.
Mike Ladd released Feb. 4 ’99 (For All Those Killed by Cops) on Tue Mar 07 2000.