If hip-hop is the night club of music,
The place where everyone wants to be,
Then, metal, you are the abandoned trainyard,
The gritty reality of close friends,
Bonding over empty cans.

Bluegrass might be a picnic,
With blankets in the park.
And rap might be the ghetto,
Urban streets,
Perpetual fear.

However, you have a different touch.
Sure, phat dubstep beats sound great,
When blasted by waves of bass.
But what of the feeling,
From uncountable bass pedal strikes.
Creating a wall of hard-pressed consistency.
And when the bass drum stops,
You know you'll hear a well-practiced,
Well-executed,
Well-written fill.
From the snare, to the toms,
To the chinas and splashes.
32nd notes all around.

And if punk is a bunch of teens,
Landing one out of twelve tricks,
At the local skate park.
If reggae is a house party,
The place your parents don't want you,
But where you feel happy.

Then metal is where you feel REAL.
A darkened elementary school,
Yours for the weekend,
Reminding you where you came from.
Years and years of practice,
All leading up to a perfectly nailed arpeggio.
You don't even hear the pick as it sweeps,
String to string.
You only hear notes and scales,
Arranged just so.
Pure dedication,
Displayed by the clean solos,
And harmonies,
Which fall back into downtuned chugging,
Rhythms,
Simply rhythms,
True unison,
The brotherhood dynamic,
Of a lesser-liked genre.

And the sounds of the world,
Are the way you go to school,
To work and home again,
And silence,
Is nights spent alone,
Silence is the absence of passion,
Silence is suicide,
Death.

Metal, you are my resonance.
My threshold.
And the words,
Repeated throughout my mind,
Are not shrill notes on the treble-clef.
They are not auto-tuned, worthless.
The words I feel,
The words I live,
Are the common words and phrases,
That no one can understand,
The deep grating and churning,
Of vocal chords that learn not to ring,
But to shout.
To scream.
To growl, like the guttural and primordial calls.
Of our wild side.
This growling echoes,
From throat to mind.

Metal is my flag,
My skin,
My pyre.