Concrete Diploma (Version 2)

Intro

Corner store hum, streetlight buzzing slow

Nine of us raised where the concrete don't forget

Ledger with the pen, Sable with the flow

This the diploma that the schoolyard never let

Verse

Eleven years old, split a coat four ways

Frostbite winter, cardboard box for a mattress pad

Marcus held the door when the landlord came to raze

Now he hold my name up like it's all he ever had

Taught me how to count on hands before I counted cash

Taught me how to duck when the sirens start to wail

Kept the same six numbers saved under "Fam" in my flash

Phone been through three cracks but the contacts never fail

Rooftop, summer nights, we split a single peach

Juice running down wrists, laughing till the cops rolled by

Nobody snitched when the window got in reach

Nobody left when the tide got waist high

This the curriculum they don't teach in that classroom

Loyalty's a language that you learn in the alley

Graduated hard knocks in a borrowed church-shoe costume

Valedictorian of a block they call the valley

Hook

We got a concrete diploma, hung it up with pride

Wrote in blood and sidewalk chalk, can't erase what's inside

Rode for each other when the whole world walked away

This the concrete diploma, that's why we stay

Verse

Denny took a charge that wasn't his to hold

Eighteen months upstate, wrote me letters every week

Said the block still breathing, said the story still gets told

Said stay solid, stay standing, stay humble not weak

I sent commissary money folded in a magazine

Visited on Sundays with my mama's rosary beads

He came home lighter but his eyes still had that sheen

Planted him a garden where the old crew used to bleed

Now we got a bakery two blocks from the church

Ledger doing books, Sable spitting on the mic

Kept the same five faces through the drought and through the search

Never let the money turn a brother into ice

This the kind of debt that don't show up on a paper

Paid in loyalty, in casseroles, in late-night calls

Every scar's a signature, every block a chapter

Every name I mentioned still the reason that I stand tall

Hook

We got a concrete diploma, hung it up with pride

Wrote in blood and sidewalk chalk, can't erase what's inside

Rode for each other when the whole world walked away

This the concrete diploma, that's why we stay

Bridge

Some of us in suits now, some of us still grinding

Some of us in heaven watching over how we're climbing

Don't matter what the zip code, don't matter what the sky is

The circle never broke, the circle just got wiser

Outro

Corner store still humming, streetlight still on time

Ledger closed the books, Sable closed the rhyme

We ain't need the paper, we ain't need the frame

Concrete wrote our names, and the concrete kept the same