[Verse 1:]
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Shackles are heavy on the wrist
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Stacked like sardines, belly of a ship
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Live in your own piss and shit and being seasick
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Cracked across your back with a thick leather whip
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Salt water burns through your wounds
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Women are starving with babies in their wombs
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On your hands and knees trying to cry God please
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Exhausted your voice is too weak to speak
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Neighbors and strangers are dying beside you
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Their decaying bodies you're tied to
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Cling tight to your fight for survival
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Wonder if your tribe will ever try to find you
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Arrive somewhere strange, the air is cold
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You can see your breath and you're barely clothed
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Your first time ever seeing snow
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Sleeping next to it on a hard dirt floor
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Go from can't seeing see in the morning to can't see at night
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You work till your hands bleed white
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Your native language you can't recite
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Murdered on sight if you try to read or write
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When you bend all of your life and can't see the light
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It get's painful to stand upright
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Right?
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And your eyes bear the sight of your wife
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Being being pulled from your shack and brutalized at night
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You only taste joy when babies are born
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Which becomes an occasion to mourn
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Separated, torn from your celebrating arms
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Then as quickly as they came they were gone
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Sold away from your farm this is all they've known
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Never heard stories from home
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They forget your name T
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The culture from which you came
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Teaching it'll get you slain.
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Praying to your god will get you the same and tortured to near death lest you complain
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No Choice left you sing through the pain and pray that your suffering wasn't in vain
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End of your chain, end of your life
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Your grandchildren born with no end is sight
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So you muster up all of your might
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And your last breath comes out... fight
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This is actually true
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Now stop and imagine that's you
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Now stop imagining unravel the truth and ask just who is it happening to
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Everything that the passenger do
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The driver experience too
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So if humanity is one
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Then we all get burned when it's hell that we're traveling through
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[Chorus:]
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You've got to save my soul
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Put me back together make me whole
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Said we don't know which way to go
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Take my hand and place me on that road
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[Verse 2:]
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Trapped in a history we don't understand
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Can't remember how this blood got on our hands
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Never been taught about the ugly past
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Expecting God not to punish man
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Our ancestors brought us control
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We realize now that the cost was our soul
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Got me feeling like an empty shell
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Prison guard that inherited a cell
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I'm desperate to find my place
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Emptiness lies behind my face
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Flowers only die in a vase
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A heart only dies encased in a lie we call race
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I hear the song but I can't sing along
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Something's really wrong I can't put my finger on
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Terrified to admit it's wrong
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Cause I'm hiding in the ruins of a legacy that still lives on
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Our identity is hinged upon the miserable myth we've been caught since we're born
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Until we mend what was torn
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The debt of a sin lingers long after the vicitim's moans
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This is actually true
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Now stop and imagine that's you
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Now stop imagining unravel the truth
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And ask just who is it happening to
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Everything that the passenger do the driver experience too
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So if humanity is one then we all get burned when it's hell that we're traveling through
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[Chorus]
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The Travelers
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Brother Ali |