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.