For Him
Tupac was a young revolutionary
Don't try to understand him
The visionary and child
Ahead of the game, while the game
Was making him into a paradox.
Do not put him in the collar
Of pop culture
To corner him in a box.
This was a bird that needed wings
To sing slave children's truth,
He is the oracle confronted by the brute.
Tupac did not understand ... the rope lengthening
And he the old tree of a young self yawning
How history made him ... and all of us
What we did not want to be ... him
Growing up loving his father hating his bars
The noble soldier against a racist system
Sentenced to silence, swapping the children for rats
On a piper's plan ...
And all the while his mother lived far away
In a time when the sons of her sisters
Are no longer profiled and crucified
For sins that all our dying cannot cleanse
There was no other choice than this:
Exiled in the free embargoed land
Sierra Maestra sentries everywhere
Pictures of Che under her pillow
Theorizing the redemption of her son
Through a classical education
As if a polite mind would simply be enough
To hide a child's soul from the visions tough.
Tupac, my scholar poet
Turned to his imagination
The Eldridge Cleaver of the microphone
An isolation of our exclamation ... unmuting us in word
Tupac, malignant in my memory
Poet, soldier, scholar, mankind's
Boldest son
Prisoner of history and the streets
Killed by derision
Before the hunter's bullet found
Their mark ... exploding the candle
Of a better dream
My warrior song for the warrior scream
Tupac, lovely as a lilly
And no ressurection in the streets again
Nothing here balms the odyssey of pain
Until death has done its dirty duty.
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