Lyrics by Levi Mathes – #hiphopmusic #hiphop #rap #rapmusic #boombapmusic #boombap bap
27th and Indian School.
Phoenix.
[VERSE 1]
Twenty-seventh and Indian, heat bending the block,
School bell, then shells — different hands on the clock.
Teacher said “future”; we were present with danger,
Read faces before pages, learned fear from strangers.
Dope boys, working girls — violence in verbs.
Kicked out, switched schools — same lesson, new class,
Moved houses so often I got fluent in packed.
Home was an address that expired when we left,
Kept baggage in boxes, put the rest in my chest.
Lost Pops young — family tree lost timber,
Roots still remember.
Black sheep — they pulled wool, I saw through the weave,
Funny how blood says “family” then teaches you leave.
[HOOK]
27th and Indian School,
that’s where they raised me.
Lost a lot, saw a lot,
look what the fuck it made me.
Fire tried to brand me,
but the flame couldn’t name me.
Ghosts still talk in my head —
they don’t fucking own me.
[VERSE 2]
Buffalo Soldiers — “American” stamped on the name,
Colonel Long III — rank still rings in my memory,
They called it discipline; I remember it differently.
“Character building” — character assassination,
Break a kid down, then critique the renovation.
Cuffed to a pool table — lesson in restraint,
Concrete under my body put weight behind pain.
A kid died there; some sentences don’t end,
They serve life in your mind, get repeated again.
Buried that shit, but the dirt fed the roots,
Now strange fruit hangs over pieces of youth.
Drugs found vacancy, put a lease in my veins,
I rented out peace just to purchase escape.
Chased getting high while my life hit a low,
Tried burying the past; every high made it grow.
Fuck cops, fuck rules — rage wrote legislation,
Wanted freedom so bad, built my own incarceration.
[FLOW SWITCH]
Pain was currency.
I spent it for change.
Chip became boulder.
Boulder became chains.
So I learned how to build
with the weight of my pain.
[VERSE 3]
Then her.
Best friend.
No title. No touch. No claim.
Never gave what we were a name —
still she gave my silence language.
Even without a title, you knew every version of me,
Read between every line where I buried what was hurting me,
I never called you mine — still your absence took a part of me,
Crazy how somebody I never had could leave this hard in me,
And that’s the cruelest truth — you weren’t my girl, you were my heart’s missing property.
I was married to destruction,
she never asked to be the bride,
Just made me question why surviving
was the only way I lived my life.
She didn’t save me —
that’s too cheap for what she gave.
She made me see I had some value
before I put myself up for sale.
Never dated.
Never fucked
Never called it love.
That’s what fucks with me…
No title —
still her name stayed written in my heart.
Never called her mine —
so tell me what the fuck I lost when we fell apart?
No breakup, no divorce,
no anniversary to erase,
Just somebody I never “had”
leaving an everybody-sized space.
She had no claim to me,
still claimed the parts I kept concealed.
Never touched my body,
but touched shit in me that never healed.
She found gold in the dirt
when I only saw the miner —
I was digging my own grave,
she made me dig a little higher.
Then the bond broke —
no stocks, still crashed from the loss.
We never put a price on us;
grief itemized the cost.
That’s the cruelest kind of heartbreak:
no relationship to end —
How the fuck you mourn a lover
when you only lost a friend?
[VERSE 4]
Now forty, opening boxes I packed as a kid,
Same baggage, new address — finally facing the shit.
Every scar got prints, every ghost got a statement,
Those cracks in the structure became my foundation.
Black sheep came back with the wool off his vision,
They counted me out; now every count gets precision.
Cuffs taught restraint — now restraint’s in the cadence,
That sentence they gave me? I commute it on stages.
Drugs lost the lease; I reclaimed the residence,
Pain paid tuition; these bars are the evidence.
School of hard knocks — no dean, no permission,
Majored in anger, minored in bad decisions.
Periods ain’t endings when the writer survives,
Turned dots into ellipses — motherfucker, I’m alive.
Cracked roots, cuffs, concrete, backstreets,
Bad homes, gun smoke, packed dreams, cracked sleep.
Moved school, moved house, couldn’t move what I carried,
Got married to chaos, then buried the marriage.
Lease in my veins, deed on my heart,
Everything I couldn’t own tried owning my parts.
Chip became boulder, boulder foundation,
Weight meant to crush me became renovation.
Every ghost gets a bar.
Every scar gets a sentence.
Every loss gets a voice.
Every verse gets vengeance.
They put a period where they thought I’d end —
I made it an ellipsis…
I’m not finished yet.
[FINAL HOOK]
27th and Indian School,
that’s where they raised me.
Fire tried to brand me,
but the flame couldn’t name me.
Ghosts still talk —
they don’t own me.
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