Saul Williams

i laced my shoes with sorrow and walked a weary road dead end streets don't come undone with double knots wing tipped shoes that walk on air through vacant lots

There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, “yes,” in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.

Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life.

We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is our alchemy.

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.

A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.

I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons

I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.

For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children so long for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers we live

What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

I dance for no reason, for reasons you can't dance, Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance You can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can't be store-bought.

pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near (...) the beginning

only through new words might new worlds be called into order

i am like a survivor of the flood walking through the streets drenched with God surprised that all of the drowned victims are still walking and talking

she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun