Educated

You have dark brown hair that is cornrowed to the tee, save some zig-zagged parts and overlapping weaves of dead fibers that make you look like a thug. Your eyes squint constantly at the light of day, because you are a creature of the dark, feel at home in the streets only by the dull, blinking glow of artificial city light where it is harder to be seen and easier to move. Your skin was beautiful, mocha caramel, now café con sprinkles of color and blotches of tribal art, unnatural images of percieved toughness, only the strong survive but the stupid die young, and the body grafitti looks like a bullseye for stray bullets to penetrate and destroy. Laced up wheat Timbs in the summer, confining hot feet of the cool, dark denim meant to cover your ass and chill your legs now cools your ass and warms your ankles, image more important than comfort in this day you wish was night.
Your language is beautiful and yours, and flows from that mocha mouth like an endless stream of street knowledge, this place where you are king of the corner, ruler of this intersection of lost souls and devoted dark angels. Your words entrap them, wise to the unknowing, and when you enter another domain, you speak the native tongue, blend in with the vernacular of the rulers of bigger grids, only your mocha skin makes you noticed. Or is it those zig-zagged weaves of dead fibers, cornrowed to the tee. Or is it the sprinkles of color and blotches of art on your mocha skin. Or should that even matter as long as you can act like them. But the grid is set up to never blend in.