Bray of the Cleveland Thug

​I was born up in Cleveland, a city you may know,
my parents hard workers, to the factory did go;
my folks were pious, sent me to Sunday school
didn’t raise me up to add to the human cesspool.

​Then I got in with girls, guns, drugs and gangs
skateboarding, tags, graffiti, talking heavy slang
when my words hit the wall from the spray paint can
the cops were right there waiting to throw me in the van.

What I had in my pocket, it really made them scream
a semiautomatic with a loaded magazine
I was taken to the station, and then I went to jail
by iron bars surrounded, my poor folks refused to bail.

They held me in the juvey, for what seemed like forty nights
I learned how to do more crimes, & started picking fights.
I drank the jailers moonshine whenever I got a batch
it tasted like cough syrup, but I shoved it down my hatch.

It wasn’t the only thing that got shoved when time came to push
from behind, ambush, someone sliced my ruddy throat with a shiv
spraying blood all over the linoleum, I almost didn’t live.
Nobody said the living was easy or this was going to be cush.

The next day I plotted back on how best to get revenge
so in the play yard I got a rock, clobbered him like stonehenge
busted up his skull so good he was surely going to die
the jury found me guilty, electric I was sentenced, in the chair to fry.

​So they had to move on, sent me down to Mansfield town
I’d moved up to the big time, with my hangman’s head swinging down.
They put me on a southbound bus on a cold December day
I could hear my mom and dad crying, I had surely lost my way.

My dad he turned to drinking, and started going to the bar
my mom with spirits sinking lost sight of her guiding star.
She would come to visit me once, every couple moons
we’d between the glass, her heart had been harpooned.

I once had a girl in Cleveland town, a girl now I know I loved,
If ever I get my freedom back, I’ll act as simple as a dove.
If ever I get my liberty, this thug life I’ll surely shun
sipping drink and slinging drugs, fighting and shooting guns.

To you who have your freedom, pray keep it while you can,
Don't run around like a stupid clown and flaunt the laws of man;
for if you do, you’ll find yourself in a sorry state  like me,
rotting away behind bars, in the state penitentiary.