Me'Shell Ndegeocello - Baldwin Manifesto II Lyrics

The second proposition is what I really want to get at tonight, and it sounds mystical
I think in a country like ours, at a time when something awful is happening to a civilization

When it ceases to produce poet
And even more crucial ceases to believe in the report that only poets can make people
Millions of people who you will never see, who don't know you, will never know you
People who may try to kill you in the morning, they live in terrible darkness
That if you have that fun, terrible thing that every artist can recognize
But no artist can define
You are responsible to those people, to lighten that darkness
It doesn't matter what happens to you
You are being used in the way a crab is useful
The way sand certainly has some function
It isn't personal, this force that you didn't ask for
A destiny, which you must accept

It's also your responsibility and if you survive it, if you don't achieve
If you don't lie, it is not only your glory, your achievement
It is almost our only hope because only an artist can tell and only artists have told
Since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it
What it's like to die or to have somebody die, what it's like to fear death
To fear, to love, to be glad, hymns don't do this
Churches really cannot, cannot
Churches really cannot do it
The trouble is that all of Tthe artists can do it
The price he has to pay himself
And that you the audience must also pay is a willingness to give up everything
To realize that although you spend twenty-seven years
Acquiring this house, this furniture, this position
Although you spend forty years raising this child, these children
Nothing, none of it belongs to you
You can only have it by letting go
You can only take if you are prepared to give
And giving is not an investment, it is not a day at the bargain counter
It's a total risk of everything of you, of who you think you are
Of who you'd think you'd like to be, where you think you'd like to go