[Sung Intro]
Praise is what i do,
when i want to get close to you.
I lift my hands in praise.
Praise is who i am,
I will praise you all i can,
I lift my hands in praise.
Praise the silence.
Praise the moment,
before the breath in the microphone.
Praise the poems,
how they perch on top of tongues as stealthy as hawks.
How we use eardrums like prey
and feast on sound like vultures.
Praise the vibrations,
the tectonic in our throats and we spin these stanzas into tornadoes,
Let's make it rain tonight.
Praise the rain.
How thunderstorms sound like,
snapping fingers after a punchline.
Praise the punchline,
the night you stood up until the sunrise and said
"Woo! This poem might be hot!"
Praise the heat,
the fires you've started on stage.
Praise the fight,
how they told us these words wouldn't take us this far,
how they lost faith in the sonic booms in our pens.
Praise the explosions.
How we smell like,
Pearl Harbor and spit like,
two bombs strapped to my side,
each riding a hip like a carousel.
Praise the Ka-Boom! Bang! Boom! Bang!
Boom!
Praise the nerves and how it still makes us human after we thought we reached our peak.
Praise the mountains and how we move them,
crumbling grand canyons in a matter of three minutes and thirty seconds,
i mean, don't we all always want all eyes on us?
Praise the time and the magnitude of urgency it gives the world because the
Tick-Tock tick-tick-tick-tick-tock
can fade to dust in the blink of an eye.
Praise the eyes
and the stories it lets us read,
the love it lets us see.
Praise the kiss and the knees that buckle under them.
Praise the mouth,
the voice it carries and the starvation it holds hostage.
You know, they must have forgotten that starving artists be the hungriest beasts,
thus,
me and my people at the dinner table ready to eat.
This gra-vy gets no better!
Praise our minds,
the head,
the cranium,
the skull,
the medulla oblongata,
[Prayer]
Peace!
God, Praise the spirit
and when they try to stunt on your beliefs,
tell them you're
half slave ship,
half holocaust,
the diaspora lingering like
bad breath and gingerfied gunshots,
because it never made much sense to me how we can
swallow a box of bullets and still be standing.
Praise the backbone and the posture it has given us,
don't you know?
We stand like pyramids.
Don't you know?
We're on point like periods.
Cut a smile on the universe's face then ask,
"Why so serious?".
Praise the struggle.
It only makes our testimony worth speaking when we force our way through the gates of heaven.
Praise our lives and every single moment that makes us supernatural.
This is how you stare into the face of impossible,
this is how you stare into the face of the devil and say,
Yeah Motherf**er.
I'm here.
And i'm split open like a C-section.
Exposed heart and flesh.
And i'm ready to spit.
Ready to speak.
Ready to move.
Ready to love.
Love.
Love.
Love.
Ready to praise before the moment when its all gone.
Before the moment when its all gone.
Before the moment when
[Sung Outro]
Praise is what i do,
When i want to to get close to you.
I lift my hands in praise.