Ancient Future
VERSE 1:From South Bronx to Southwest PDX the cable stretches, from an era of unrest to the postmodern matrix. In an act of space-time collapse these two ends become braided. I, today, can take youback to tenements vacated by the b-boys we celebrate on fade t-shirts, degraded to icons on iBooks and reworked over dance floors now getting crowded. I didn’t know the history—the lyrics inthe interim were loudest. Now that I’m sho’nuf grown up and looking backward down the tracks I can see the path its taken, it had to happen. Multinational corporations had to jack rap and sling itsoulless like IHOP be slinging flap jacks. But moving past that was a current out of phase with the dollar-driven wackness. Like a seed beneath the surface it nurtured all the talent. It’s thisunderground tradition that hones my own endowment. Watch me grow, clock my flow, from this pen springs a fountain. It’s a force which finds its source in the Cornerstone rejected while buildingprofits in every quarter. [Ancient Future]

VERSE 2:Like Rakim knocking upon your door, I’ve got that old school flavor with a new school flow. Rapping is fantastic on the mic, I know. I done did it for a minute and I’m back for more.

Searching for the perfect speech like a perp lurking murky streets, working beats from my suburbanperch serving leaks until the internet gets deleted. I seek the tetragrammaton in Babylon and yet no one can speak it. The Word is what I frequent out of sequence when I mine it. Trying to find timelyand shake hands with he who signed it. Desperately investigating silence so that these tones have spine behind them as I wind through rhyming lines lit with dim wit swimmingly fit to spit from brokentongue tips behind the lips that I happened to be born with, scorned as I was born split between two worlds. Vocabulary was necessarily key to the worlds of wisdom over rhythm it was gifted like theGab in visions it was hinted that I had a mission to diminish to get past the finish as a Master’s apprentice. I mimic what I see in the greatest emcee to spit a sentence: Meek or menace, LivingRivers or death sentence. Two millennium hence, I draw a million breaths then it’s... [Ancient Future]

VERSE 3:The time is now, the place is here, that’s where you’re at. ‘Cause where you’re from has now become a window in your past. History comes quickly and by conquerors is cast. But herein lies themystery: the truth has never lapsed. The chain remains unbroken from before now to the after. Who dominates abominates and takes the truth a captor. So kings and states and corporations staketheir claims on souls, but the shape of fate for souls at stake they’ll never wholly own. Solely the Soul Controller holds that power in his grasp. Who hesitates will lose their strength, this moment’s whatwe have. We’ve got to break the fakeness. Everybody, drop your mask! Life is wasted waiting for the minute hand to mash. The ancients practiced patience but they knew the time for action. The futurewill be waiting for the present to bring prophets; organic mechanics of global culture from the projects, speaking the Secret as plain as day defying logic, breaking beats into tonic for chronichopelessness, shaking defeat to overcome, [Ancient Future] opening up to the... [Ancient Future]

 CHRIS RISER 2006