Eric: From city to hinge, my question is: Whose drum set of keys unlock crescendo when the knob spins? I forge time’s signature on expired permission slips to file grievances while the blind touch treaties and the deaf can only sign agreements. Toy soldiers stand post on windowsills while armies of entire anthills march on makeshift treadmills. You build up new walls with built-in heating vents like fish gills labeled “Exhale Only.” This reminder useful but, nonetheless, institutional—every rhyme a sigh when it’s time to swallow this musical pharmaceutical. So we take pills for disaster relief and fall asleep against the door like narcoleptic Christmas wreaths… Knock, knock… Mystique is peeking through submarine peepholes like telescopic air pockets of deep sea clothes. Wearing a dry wetsuit is implied, I suppose, it goes without saying, yet I told that story to those who weren’t listening, imposing slipstream of consciousness when pulling this garden of teeth up by the roots while the weeds are loose—a reasonable excuse for the remaining screws to refuse any other relation (-) mother (/) ship to maneuver around even the most reduced width of my Jupiter…
I tried holding back, but even Cain wasn’t Abel…
To all the candy rappers littering the streets: All you spit is misdirected, bittering the sweet… To all the players wearing cleats: It’s game over—just accept defeat… To all the jumpers staring thirty flights down…
Nate: …at concrete, taking steps with cold feet…cuz when you hit the pavement psychologists explain it. The portraits we’ve painted reveal who’s dedicated—refinish a beat like hardwood floors after you stain it…
Eric: Flying off the popular catapult like a curled-up skeletal cannonball, I skinny dip you do a flyby overshot and hit the asphalt performing somersaults. I enter with a chorus effect when bursting through locked vaults, then I realize it’s all my fault, cuz DNA is my digital defect. Like mirrors in funhouse hallways, I reflect sound waves that display every molecule displaced. Open my mouth and eat my own face—don’t talk with it full while Newton vomits gravity’s sequel. An apple’s computerized blood spill, synthetic magnetic pull erasing description. You try decoding encryption but smoke from the friction resembles steamboat emission from alcoholic ears during prohibition. It’s a new year, count down to ignition—together we equal just a fraction of pretension over self-recognition…
Nate: I loop de-loop like a 666, with every hook that I fix with words I match and mix. Getting sick like immune deficiency with efficiency, dispensing expenses like a priest at a christening. To all who’s listening, like beads of sweat I’m glistening with such a shine that burns your eyes to the extent of blistering. Yeah, I’m a product—think of me like sawdust. When finished and polished I’m that and the demolished. Abolish all repetitive prophesies like Plato and Socrates, disturbing all minds at ease, exposing deficiency. Strife erotic, violent, exotic as a silent melodic contradicted by a psychotic. Making a flavor that Mother Nature would savor—my pen’s blotting this paper like arthritic acid makers. System’s erratic like carpets producing static rubbing wrong like streaming song turn automatic sporadic. Instamatic: Your expression’s conceivable with what makes me believable, so golden yet unretrievable. A fired-up example like napalm free sample dishing out toxins like cards when you gamble…
To all you candy rappers littering the streets: All you spit is misdirected, bittering the sweet… To all the players wearing cleats: It’s game over—just accept defeat… To all the jumpers staring thirty flights down…
Eric: …at concrete, taking steps with cold feet…cuz when you hit the pavement psychologists explain it. The portraits we’ve painted reveal who’s dedicated—refinish a beat like hardwood floors after you stain it…
Nate: I’m on a bender when I enter the center, low-down verbal offender, violent-message sender. Pretenders mass-produce on a daily basis and, if they did it my way, you'd live your lives in stasis. Coming from all sides, I’m the whiteout in the blizzard—if this was a fairy tale I’d be an all-powerful wizard. Arising dysfunction, under construction, sealed tight like a suction seconds from eruption that goes flash through the shattering glass—I understand that you’re slow but you better think fast. It’s your ass begging for mercy from these showering shards piercing so powerfully hard you’re multi-hourly scarred. Everyone’s so susceptible to rehearsals and commercials. I bring sound wave disturbances to vindictive reversals. Coming with curses like snatchers grabbing purses, increasing the need for nurses—decreasing the fuel in hearses. If you were a tumor, you’d be diagnosed benign. To spin around and pin the tail’s your intimate design. To all the small-game bait, I’m the big-vein master—like a nine and two ones’ a recipe for disaster…
Eric: Leaving us fake as a face on a magazine, like a psychotropic dream on Thorazine… On the road our whips careen down the back of another false Nazarene—the bread of life is an accidental cuisine. It can’t be weighed or measured. Suicide lines—in the electric chair I pull my own lever. My skull is a three-prong outlet: Plug in, don’t get upset while waiting for the onset of side effects. My third eye’s a malfunctioning implant, burst when I blink like a silicone breast that won’t float when the mainland sinks. They’re not to be tampered with while your phantom lips are licking my pampered wit, while I spit these economically viable sedatives. I don’t submit to the editors—that’s time wasted better spent working on rhymes like pills dispensed. Your dogma spilling ink on my pants—the knights and samurais got pissed when the pen could invent new ways of murdering us all, before brick-wall critics could mimic insults with aerosol…
Nate: To all you candy rappers littering the streets…
Eric: …all you spit is misdirected, bittering the sweet…
Nate: To all the players wearing cleats…
Eric: …it’s game over—just accept defeat…
Nate: To all the jumpers staring thirty flights down…
Eric: …at concrete…
Nate: …taking steps with cold feet…
Eric: …cuz when you hit the pavement…
Nate: …psychologists explain it…
Eric: The portraits we’ve painted…
Nate: …reveal who’s dedicated…
Eric: …refinish a beat…
Nate: …like hardwood floors…
Eric: …after you stain it…
