They say the odds against me are crooked and impossible
Like I was born with a hole in my heart is an obstacle
I was left to die by the doctors in the Children's Hospital
But I never lose hope, success is psychological

The world is volatile and the street is my education
Shaping the nation like the blueprint of a mason
While Shawshank record deals get you ****d on occasion
So I'm focused on my economic situation

I'm like the little kids on TV that dig through the trash
I hustle regardless of the way you talk **** and laugh
A lot of *****z drop science but they don't know the math
Because their mind is narrower than the righteous path

It's funny how on the block *****z will kill you for cash
But never raise the gun and cry out, 'Freedom at last'
The cold war is over but the world is still gettin' colder
Atlas walking through the projects with the hood on my shoulders

I would like to raise my children to grow to be soldiers
But then the general would decide when their life would be over
So I work hard until my personality split
Like the Black Panthers, into the Bloods and the Crips

They said I would never be **** but now I sit and reminisce
Like Yeshua Ben Yusef flippin' through Genesis
Ignorance is venomous and it murders the soul
Spreading like a virus running rampant but out of control

So if I should ever fall and get caught in a hustle
Let them know that I died while I fought in a struggle
From the hood rats to the rich kids lost in a bubble
Spray painting on the streets and at the subway tunnels

Write it down and remember that we never gave in
The mind of a child is where the revolution begins
So if the solution has never been to look in yourself
How is it that you expect to find it anywhere else?

Immortal Technique in the streets, back on the hustle
'Cause three strikes will get you life for stuffin' cracks in a duffel
Upstate behind steel gates, intact in the scuffle
Razor blades stuck on the side of pencils, hacked to your muscle

But the emptiness is what bleeds you to death when it cuts you
And it's the lawyers, not the inmates scheming to ***k you
Trying to fight the system from inside eventually corrupts you
But that's what you get when you put a corporation above you

And it's the people that love you that seem to hurt you the most
Sometimes when they die, you find yourself cursing their ghost
But you make success, nobody delivers your fate
Sometimes you give and you take
Since prehistoric vertebrates crawled out of the lakes

And that's the truth about life
Or to do it to ghetto and your car, rims and your ice
Because even though we survived through the struggle that made us
We still look at ourselves through the eyes of people that hate us

But I'm going to make it regardless of the trumped up charges
And semi-automatic barrages that empty the cartridge
Post-traumatically scar kids that try to be brave
Because *****z back stab each other, just to try to get paid

Turn cannibal like knights during the Crusades
Afraid of responsibility, addicted to greed
Beating their girls purposefully, losing a seed
As if we were bound to the destiny we used to receive

So if I should ever fall and get caught in a hustle
Let them know that I died while I fought in a struggle
From the hood rats to the rich kids lost in a bubble
Spray painting on the streets and at the subway tunnels

Write it down and remember that we never gave in
The mind of a child is where the revolution begins
So if the solution has never been to look in yourself
How is it that you expect to find it anywhere else?

I used to wonder about people who don't believe in themselves
(I used to wonder)
But then I saw the way that they portrayed us to everyone else
That cursed us, then only see the worst in ourselves
Blind to the fact the whole time we were hurting ourselves

I used to wonder about people who don't believe in themselves
(I used to wonder)
But then I saw the way that they portrayed us to everyone else
That cursed us, then only see the worst in ourselves
blind to the fact the whole time we were hurting ourselves
I used to wonder