Weight I Carry Home (Version 2)

Intro

Four a.m., streetlight humming, breath like smoke

Same old jacket, same old hunger, same old road

Young Marlow, yeah, I carry what I'm owed

Verse

Bus stop bench, cardboard cold beneath my knees

Counting cracks in concrete like they're currencies

Mama on the phone saying baby please come home

But home's a hallway where the heat don't ever blow

Nineteen years, I'm sharpening my edges quiet

Diary full of bars nobody bought or bought a riot

Corner store receipts, I'm writing rhymes on the back

Every no I swallowed turned to fuel for the attack

Twelve-hour shifts then I'm ghost into the booth

Sleep is for the settled, I ain't settled, I'm the proof

Watched my uncle chase a dream till the dream chased back

Told me son the weight'll break you or it'll build your stack

So I load it on my shoulders like a duffel full of stone

Every step a little heavier the closer that I'm grown

This the price they never mention when they clock your grind

Weight I carry home, but I carry mine

Chorus

This the weight I carry home

Bricks of doubt turned into stone

Every step I walk alone

Building something I still own

This the weight I carry home

Heavy crown but it's my throne

Watch me turn this dust to gold

This the weight I carry home

Verse

Two years later, different bench, same kind of cold

Studio session paid in favors, no gold

Engineer said run it back, I ran it fifty times

Till the hook was hitting harder than my landlord's signs

Eviction notice folded up inside my coat

Turned the pain to punchlines, turned the lump into a quote

Momma got the callback, better hours, better pay

Still I'm in the trenches writing verses either way

Doubt sit at my table like an uninvited guest

I feed it all my failures, tell it that's the best I got left

But hunger don't retire when the hunger built the man

Every closed door taught my knuckles how to understand

Now the weight got texture, some of it's my team

Cousins on the hook line, chasing the same dream

Heavier but lighter cause we splitting up the load

This the weight I carry, this the weight that built the road

Chorus

This the weight I carry home

Bricks of doubt turned into stone

Every step I walk alone

Building something I still own

This the weight I carry home

Heavy crown but it's my throne

Watch me turn this dust to gold

This the weight I carry home

Bridge

Funny how the heavy load's the one that made me strong

Funny how the empty nights turned into this song

I don't want it lighter, no, I want it understood

Every scar's a signature, every bruise is proof I stood

Outro

So I'm carrying it forward, past the corner, past the pain

Every brick I'm stacking building up a new terrain

This the weight I carry home

And I ain't setting down the stone