Policing the people, Babylon
Policing the people, policing the people
Babylon, policing the people
Product of partition
Dripped in Prada for this fiction
Proud of superstitions
Got powder in the kitchen
Powerful
Superpowers be killing ya
America, Britain, power for villains
Powerful positions, power for the pigeons, powder for the chitlins
Power for offshore drilling
Pirates plunder, pillage, killing civilians
Counting, currency's millions
Politics make victim for income
Parlor tricks, schism from system
Now that I'm policing the people
Take a man and they shift
That's Patriot Act
That's a privacy prison, that Pentagon
They vision is prism
Got what we ask for, someone to listen
Handcuffs smother our phone
Jail cell martyr
Guard your home, label with stones
Government drones, cookie-cutter clones
Then the towers fell in front of my eyes
And I remember the principal said they wouldn't
And for a month they used my high school as a triage
And so we went to school in Brooklyn
And the city's board of Ed hired shrinks for the students
And maybe I should have seen one
And from then on they called us all Osama
This old Sikh man on the bus was Osama
I was Osama, we were Osama
Are you Osama?
And so we rushed to buy flags for our doors
Bright American flags that read "I am not Osama"
And we ironed our polo shirts and we combed our hair
And we proudly paid our taxes
And we immediately donated to a local white politician
And we yelled "I'm just like you" as quietly and calmly as we could
So as not to raise too much attention and be labeled a troublemaker and lose one's job
Like when my name is too long to pronounce at work and raised too much attention
And I was labeled a troublemaker, so I changed it
And we scrubbed words like bomb from our vocabulary
And airports changed to us forever
Where another blue uniform came to represent oppression or undressing
And another blue uniform came to represent stops and frisks, depressing
And our parents began to fear for our lives whenever we walked out the door
Because they read the news, and another cab driver was beaten to death
And yesterday, more than 10 years later, another man from the neighborhood was deported
I went to expensive white people school with his daughter
For four years we read books and together we yelled "I'm just like you"
But she won't get to correct her father's English at dinner anymore
And the FBI harassed one of my dad's friends so much he packed up his stuff and took his family and they moved back to Pakistan
They would come at night and they would wake them up and make a mess, and the mess upset his wife
Those giant metal birds in the sky brought my parents near and made things confusing
And then crashed into those buildings and made things confusing
But I guess it's okay because my dad wasn't deported
And I still get to correct his English at dinner
So he doesn't raise too much attention and get labeled a troublemaker