Copper Taste on Fulton Ave (Version 2)

Intro

Fulton Ave don't forgive, but it remembers your name

Corner store sign flickers same way it did before the fame

Fourteen years old, tasted copper for the first time there

Learned that silence got a flavor when you bite it and don't share

Verse

Nosebleed on the curb, June heat, gnats on the light pole

Marcus swung first, I swung back, split him down his eyebrow

Tasted pennies in my mouth, spit red into the grate

Held my ground till Pop Ray came and told us both to wait

He didn't ask who started it, just looked us dead in the eye

Said the block keeps score longer than the ones who testify

Walked home with my shirt torn, denim jacket hid the stain

Told my mother I got jumped, watched her jaw clench down on pain

She didn't cry, just cleaned the cut, said scars don't make the man

It's what you carry after, what you choose to understand

Next week Marcus dap me up outside the barbershop door

Both of us older now, tasting something we ain't taste before

Copper fades to iron, iron fades to just a story

Told at cookouts, laughed about, dressed up like it's glory

But I remember biting down, choosing not to swing again

That silence cost me something Fulton never gave me back

Chorus

Copper taste on Fulton Ave, that's how you learn to walk away

Spit it out before it stains the only pride you got to save

Copper taste on Fulton Ave, teeth clenched, temper on a leash

Some scars don't show, they just live quiet underneath your teeth

Verse

Sixteen now, same corner, different kind of heat applied

Dice game got loud, a nine came out, everybody scattered wide

I froze up half a second, tasted metal on my tongue

Not from a fist this time, just fear doing what fear does to young

Watched a man I used to trust turn into someone I don't know

Watched loyalty get tested by a debt he couldn't owe

I didn't run, I didn't stay, just backed up toward the light

Called it wisdom after, but it tasted like the same old fight

That copper taste ain't leave me, followed me to twenty-one

Sat with me at funerals, sat with me when work was done

It's the flavor of restraint, of biting back a thousand times

Of choosing quiet over chaos when the chaos rhymes with mine

Fulton got a rhythm made of almosts and near-misses

Made of boys who learned to swallow instead of throwing fists

Some called it soft, I called it staying breathing till the morning

Copper taste still on my tongue, still there, still warning

Chorus

Copper taste on Fulton Ave, that's how you learn to walk away

Spit it out before it stains the only pride you got to save

Copper taste on Fulton Ave, teeth clenched, temper on a leash

Some scars don't show, they just live quiet underneath your teeth

Bridge

I asked Pop Ray, years later, why he never picked a side

He said the block don't need more winners, it needs men who survived

Said every taste of copper is a lesson wearing red

Teaches you the difference between living and being dead

That stuck with me longer than the swelling ever did