Was it written in blood and stone?
I ponder
In my youth I met a man
whose spoken word could shape reality
A man incapable of introspection or gratitude
but nonetheless blessed with this arcane ability or inherent knowledge
The nature of such things is unimportant
And though it’s possible that he was but one of many,
he remained an anomaly to me
Even lacking evidence I stand convinced
that power like this cannot originate from the devil’s magic,
but can only be bestowed by our God Almighty
for the man would breathe a sentence into the universe and it would Be:
Kun fa yakoon
Does that not speak to Divine source?
But as I mentioned, the man was thankless and thoughtless,
too wilful, too ill-equipped to ponder on that which had been conferred upon him
He could not speak himself happy
He would not speak himself fortune
In all my long years, I’ve known of no man before or since
whose pen held as much of destiny’s ink, yet he shouldn’t write of himself with it
Why? I ponder to this day
Perhaps another of his kind had imprisoned him first
with her own words as a preventive measure
Or had they muzzled each other in invisible stalemate,
a mutually bound perverse prison?
Perhaps
Or is it much simply
that the language of fate is written in a deeper script than reality,
etched into our very blood and heaven’s stone
King’s Disease 3 by Nas, out November 11th 2022
abdulj. 