Declarations Pt. 2

I travel 7290 miles per flight, to break the language barrier,
And with a sonic booming tongue I twang a spectacular vernacular that captures
But doesn’t confine
The conglomeration of cultures that create
my mind
I Quannum leap over the galaxies of atrophied fallacies that hold back those that front with blunts
And orgies of 40’s
Because I fly on a different high while they remain drunk on the lies.
I rap my tongue around metaphors I’ve never met before
And pronounce pronouns profoundly
Punctuating paragraphs with political prose and flows that expose
The dialectical dynasties
That mental Magellans once sought to colonize.
Open your eyes, if you want to see me
As more than just some preconceived being sketched by the social studies books you skimmed in high school
Open your mind, if you want to be free
And seek mental renewal
Because We, the People,
Who have never been treated as equal
Do hereby declare that the evil doesn’t deserve a sequel.
That the pollution will be overcome by 33 1/3 revolutions
That our liberation exists somewhere between an uprock and a hard bass.
That our true language is sprayed on walls and spoken in freestyles, face to face.
That the lack of the boom bap has un-rapped the present, leaving us seeking better tomorrows.
So we borrow soul
Create new from old
And break from the molds that hold us.
While they dance around the truth,
We tinikling over their bling-bling
While they manipulate history,
We recreate memories with verbal ginseng
While they try to figure us out of the equation,
We see the math for what it really is.
We recognize that:
Music times people equals culture
The one’s and two’s should equal no other
Enemy minus envy equals brother
And people divided by bullshit equals our world.
In order to create a more perfect union of heart and soul
We hold these truths to be more relevant
That our sentiments form the sediment
Of the foundations of creation
And we’re growing impatient waiting for the changes
So we liberate this
With our 45’s
Loaded with the ammunition of breakbeats
To defeat the incomplete thought
Of those who’ve bought into it.
We bring the noise to shatter the speakers of stereotypes.
We bring the funk with our balikbayan beat boxes
We rock this
We’re metaphysical individuals
Spitting political spirituals
A people indivisible
Rockin Planets that are Digable
We’re reaching critical mass
Through nuclear ghetto blasts
Not your typical cats
We’re past that.
We strum the strings of things to come
We beat the drum
Our love is one
Isangmahal
The call to all
We cry aloud
To be heard from Luzon to Mindanao
And from Oxnard to Chi-Town.
From Seattle to Shaolin
We sing it,
We bring it.
We sing sugar cane soliloquies
Weave rice terrace tapestries
We speak a broken English to prove our lyrical mastery
Because after foreign hordes and 7000 tears of sorrow,
Our archipelago is still not free
But we’ve opened our eyes to see the “I’s” in our identities
Combining you and me into we
Breaking from the bondage of apathy.
No longer slaves to the system
We’ve learned to listen
To the lessons of our lolo’s and lola’s
Correcting our flaws
We fight for the cause
For Mumia
For manongs
For Malcom
For MacArthur Park martyrs
For you we declare our independence
For you we fight their pollution.
For you we bleed the poetry of revolution.
And for you, we search
For peace
For peace
For peace
For peace
For peace
For you
Peace.

Reclaimed

This is our 1, 2, 3
This is our first tongue
our second wind
our third eye sight
This is our divine dialect
spoken at 33 1/3 words per minute
backspun and spunback
This is our boom bap
our shclack clack
our taxi-dancehall track
This is our mango mic check
our mixtape made on broken tape decks
our milkcrate masterpiece
our streetcorner cypher beats
This is our colective head bob
our afterschool night jobs
our bamboo beatstreet breakdown
on balikbayan box battlegrounds
spinning to indigenous drum sounds
This is our thrilla in Manila
our 8th wonder agenda
sculpted in ifugao
and grown from the root down
beatboxed all the way to Manilatown
This is our 5Star constellation
spoken to fresh off the beat creations
underground invented for many nations
This is our untelevised revolution
broadcast through diffusion
This is our solution
composed of our elemental contributions
half moment half movement
This is our family tree
bearing the fruits of our history
feeding our struggle to be free
This is our 1, 2, 3.

Revolution Time ver. 1

My country tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty…

Or at least that’s what they told my family
When they came here in ‘73
That liberty and opportunity was free
Regardless of race, class, and ethnicity
That America was the land of milk and honey
And was definitely better than the Philippines
And so they left.

To win his emancipation
My father joined the military to be free
And my mother left her family at 17 to be free
And almost 30 years later freedom is still not a reality
Why?
Because in America, freedom is just a dream
A dream dreamt across oceans
Wept for by brown eyes
Fed by white lies
And swallowed with our pride
My mother cried the first night they arrived
And somewhere inside, I know she still cries
I know she still cries
Because her tears nourish my family tree
I know she still cries for me
Longs for me to see the barangy streets my fathers bare feet once walked
As he sold pan de sal to pay for school
He never dreamed that one day
His children would be asked to sell their souls
To pay for acceptance
She never dreamed that her children would grow up resenting her
For making them American
That they would rather speak broken Visayan than good English
Or prefer hopia to hamburgers
And they never dreamed that stability would only come
When their eldest son was as old as they were when they first came

Their American dreams
Became frustrated screams
At my bad grades
And their low pay
And yet they still dreamed
Sidewalk pennies were made college fund ready
And three jobs was never too many
And government cheese was a delicacy
Because it was only temporary
This insanity is only temporary
This life is only temporary
And it wasn’t that my family lived for money
Its just that in America, we’re taught that dreams aren’t free
At least not American dreams
And who can afford to dream in a land
Where Africans were once made worth only 3/5ths of a man
And a woman can only earn 3/4ths of what a man can
And indigenous peoples have lost 3/3rds of their lands.
And 3 seconds of thought is all we give to taking a stand?
We need to raise our hands
Raise our fists
Because aint no way is my people goin out like this
My family’s getting closer to that American dream
So tell me why at night they dream about the Philippines?
Because our fuckin bill of rights is way past due
And in the land of the free they still charge you
In the land of liberty there's no room for you
But when the clock spins full circle
Its revolution time
And our dreams for future seeds have to be more than just these rhymes
Our dreams for our people have to be more than just these lines
We need to raise our hands
Raise our fists
Because aint no way is my people goin out like this
We need to raise our hands
Raise our fists
Because aint no way is our people goin out like this.