You wake up one morning and decide that you want to be something – it’s not a doctor, not a lawyer. Something more mundane – something that you think makes you halfway cool. You’ve just read Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa – or you’ve watched a video clip of Patricia Smith reading. Or maybe you really are me and someone has slid a poetry anthology under your cell door. You read that little anthology and then decide that poetry is a life, a vocation. Then you wake up and realize that the rode to poverty is paved one stanza at a time, or the road to irrelevancy.

Your family looks at you – what is it you do exactly? All of a sudden you know you aren’t in the life you planned for yourself. I mean, poetry was supposed to lead to riches. It was supposed to lead to adoring fans. Instead, it has made you pay far too much attention to the world, to your flaws, to the beauty of a butterfly on your windowsill.

I’m not sure if any of that is true. The whole thing about irrelevancy. I have about a dozen poetry books on the sofa beside me. Anthologies, little books. I have a book by Joyce A Joyce that is a collection of interviews with Sonia Sanchez. I have Dante Micheaux’s new book, Amorous Shepherd. I have the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Terrence Hayes Lighthead – and I have this belief that the words mean something. That they have gotten me through some days that nothing else would have gotten me through. I have a book by Rilke talking about Cezanne. Most lessons in life I guess you can learn anywhere – but maybe there is an inescapable beauty in learning something from a book of poems.

This is the thing, there has been no hip hop artist who so embodies the contradictions of being black, male and conscious in America than Tupac Shakur.  When people talk about Pac it’s often about the creative output, it’s often about the range of gift.  Yet, there is a layer beneath that. Something that bristles to be discovered still.

I remember the first time I bought a Tupac cassette tape. It was the summer time, and my grandfather had taken me to the record store. A few days before that I’d gotten a walkman and I was ready to get some music of my own. I walk into the record store and for whatever reason I scooped up Kook G Rap and DJ Polo – one of their joints. But after a few listens I wanted a refund. And I tried to get a refund and then settled for arguing the tape was broke and getting an exchange. I picked up Strictly For My Ni**as and from there it was Tupac as the backdrop to my childhood.

What you can hear, even on that album, is the juxtaposition of thoughtful and crass. Of thugged out and mama I love you.  Listen to “Holler If You Hear Me.” On this track you find all of Pac’s thoughtfulness bumping against the theory of living ultimately cost him his life and has, in part, lead to the filling of prison cells. Hear him: “And maybe/ We can have peace someday G/But right now I got my mind set up/ Lookin down the barrel of my nine” and only a few lines later “And now I’m like a major threat/ Cause of remind you of things you were made to forget.” I’ll be the first to say that on this particular song, the things he reminds black males of is the persistence of violence in black inner city communities, and the need to stay strapped. He reminds us of this perceived inability to escape such a situation, even as a successful recording artists. But the truth is, when Pac says he reminds us of what we were made to forget, he is talking about the sentiments found in “Papa’z Song” and “Keep Ya Head Up” to mention a few tracks on this album.

“Please send me a pops before puberty, the things that I would do to see family unity.” I often tell people that growing up without a man didn’t affect me, without a father. But I remember listening to this song and gaining a context for my own life. Beyond that though, in this song Pac really gets at some of the vicious tragedies in some homes. What’s harder though, is recognizing that if the people in Pac’s songs are characters, they are recurring. The brother’s he tells to stay strapped in “Holler If You Hear Me” become the father that admits on “Papa’z Song:” “I never meant to leave where I was wanted… If I wanted to keep you breathing, had to be out of range… Maybe it’s my fault for being a father living fast… I wanted to make some dough so you’d grow to be so strong… Now I’m doing time and I wish you’d understand, all I ever wanted was for you to grow and be a man.”

I can still listen to Strictly now. I’m disturbed by the dichotomies the album creates: black vs. white, male vs. female, cops vs. inner city. The dichotomies refuse to acknowledge the nuances of the world, and they more often than not function to justify a life that is not just predicated on violence, but a life where violence is the primary currency.

Pac died at 25 years old, four years younger than I am now. As we approach what would have been his 38th birthday, I’m going to take some time and think about all these albums that influenced me. What’s wild about Strictly is that you even find what amounts to a touch of spoken word with “Something 2 Die 4.” And you hear Tupac Shakur mention Latasha Hawkins, you hear Pac exhorting us to remember her name. Saying that a bottle of juice is not something to die for. Latasha Hawkins was shot in the back of the head by a Korean store owner in LA in ’92. He mentions other names too. Dead children, children’s whose name he wants everyone to go to their grave remembering.

Listening to the album now, as a husband, as a father, as a poet, a writer – I wonder how you juxtapose the pleading voice saying remember Latasha’s name with Ice-T’s voice on “Last Wordz” shouting out, “Step to me wrong f**k around and get shot.” I’ve never been much for the idea that hip-hop contributes much to the violence in communities. But I do think that in the absence of conversation, what you hear in a song becomes the voice of argument. But Pac, he was different. He engaged in arguments with himself, even this early in his career. In “Souljah Revenge” the censorship committee ask Pac, “Mr. Shakur, will you please explain the meaning behind your violent lyrics.” And as Pac asks rhetorically, “Explain the meaning?” The track moves to the sounds of two black men running with a cop yelling freeze before firing at them while yelling out a racist expletive. Maybe Pac sincerely believed that the violence of his lyrics represented a response to the violence of the street – only then, as now, much of the violence was inflicted by black folks on black folks.

There is a more broader argument about poverty and how it contributes to violence and crime to be made – but here, I’m just thinking about Pac, about the complexity in his music, and also the failures of that awareness you hear on “Papa’z Song” to make it more consistently into more of his songs. It’s always there, that’s why years later I can still listen to Strictly – but when I listen, I’m saddened by what at times sounds like prophecy, the telling of a lifestyle that leads to too many coffins for young men far to young to be buried.

A few weeks ago I had an op-ed appear in the Washington Post. In many ways it’s one of the pieces I’m most proud of that’s been printed. Excruciating to write, I like to think it was me stepping more fully into the foray. More fully trying to publish an essay that moves away from my own life and story and into what I feel, have felt, about things I’ve seen. Also, the whole thing was pretty hard for me to see, deal with, be a part of – and I’ve long thought art was/is a response to life; but, I’ve rarely (since being released from prison) been able to use art, to use literature, to try to say something about the unexplainable. Anyway, here is the link and the piece will follow:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/22/AR2010052203045.html

Fifty years ago, James Baldwin published a letter to his nephew in which he wrote: “You were born where you were born, and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.” Baldwin could just as easily have been writing about Southeast D.C. in 2010, even with President Obama in the White House, a Metro ride away.

How else to explain statistics like this one: In a city that has grown more racially diverse, more than 90 percent of the young people under Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) supervision are black. How else to explain the low graduation rates? How else to explain the violence, at once so senseless and so expected?

Two weeks ago, the D.C. Humanities Council and Provisions Library sponsored a discussion of Ernest J. Gaines’s searing novel “A Lesson Before Dying,” the book chosen for the citywide “Big Read” program. I was part of a panel that arrived at the event expecting to discuss how Gaines’s work could offer insights to those who are part of the lives of the more than 900 young people in the DYRS system.

I first read “A Lesson Before Dying” as a 16-year-old locked up for carjacking in a Virginia jail. It was the first book I ever read cover to cover, and the questions it raises have haunted me ever since. The cells I was confined to were a long way from the death row of Gaines’s story, but they were just as much a place where black boys went to be forgotten. I wanted to suggest to the disparate group of advocates, family members, young people and passersby that in Gaines’s character Grant, we have a blueprint for how to care.

What I didn’t realize is how difficult it is to discuss a book when a cloud of death fills the air. In the audience was a father who had lost his teenage son and a mother who had lost her teenage daughter in the March 30 drive-by shooting in Southeast. I don’t pretend to know what to say in the face of such tragedy.

The discussion of the book broke down into a public meeting about DYRS policies, and from there it turned into a scream. No one could manage a word to make death make sense. There were shouts and chaos, grief and anger. One man had to be restrained. The mother rushed to the stage and slammed a photo of her murdered daughter in front of the four of us there. I wondered what it did to her to have to carry around the death of her child every day, in her head and in her heart, in the photos that spilled from her purse.

I wanted to look away from the photo, but I realized why it was there. In 1955, after 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi, Mamie Till Mobley had her son’s casket left open at his memorial service. She did this not just to remind the murderers what they had done; it was to remind the world, to remind a growing, interlocked network of communities, activists and political leaders what the turmoil of segregation and violence had wrought.

This time, the image of a murdered child was not about the same kind of racism; it was about black folks shooting down black children in the street for no reason. But James Baldwin could draw the line. “You were born where you were born, and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.” Fifteen years ago, I grew up in this area, and the most important thing for me to be was hard. I went to prison, and for many of us young black men there, behind chain-link fences and barbed wire, the most important thing was to be hard, to hold our own.

I admit today that I am not hard. I admit that I cried for two days thinking of the photo of this young girl. And still, I know my tears, these words, ultimately are a drop in the bucket — that they don’t approach the pain that this girl’s mother must carry.

Worse, I know that the pain, the tears and the screams in the small meeting room don’t approach the herculean effort needed to change this tide of senseless violence — and I fear history and our children’s children will judge us harshly if we fail to find a way.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of recording a commentary for NPR, Juveniles Need a Chance, Not Life in Prison. Some of the response to this piece was visceral, and it reminds me why discussing juvenile justice and criminal reform issues are so difficult. I admit, as someone who has spent some time in prison, much of what I say reflects a desire to see less crime and to see our systems of dealing with people who have made criminal mistakes, particularly young people, changed. But that’s not to say that I don’t recognize the heinous nature of some crimes, and the huge impact a crime that may not be rape or murder may very well have on the victims. My advocacy position is situated by my experience with the justice system. It’s as simple as that. It’s based on my belief that a just system has to allow the possible that people can change, especially if we’re going to reduce this to only non homicide offenses. This isn’t even about how overwhelmingly discriminatory the meting out of these sentences has been, nor is it about the United States being the only industrialized nation sending juveniles to prison for life for non homicide offenses. It’s about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Graham v Florida. Graham had been placed on probation for an armed burglary committed at 16, and then had his probation revoked after allegedly committing several other armed robberies – the Judge in his case revoked his probation and sentenced him to life in prison (the prosecutor asked for between 10-15 years, I believe). In their ruling the SCOTUS declared juvenile life without parole for non homicide offenses a violation of the 8th amendments cruel and unusual punishment clause and therefore unconstitutional. Essentially, the court said that a Judge cannot deem a juvenile incorrigible and beyond redemption in a non homicide case.

My NPR piece is a glimpse of my take on the situation. A right to review doesn’t guarantee release. I respect the anguish of victims and was not then, nor never am, out to make light of the impact of any crime on a person, a family. a community. I don’t think there are many people who’ve lived in or around Washington DC, that doesn’t know someone who has been a victim of a series crime. That’s why this subject is so difficult. It’s not safe. It’s about how to deal with young people who have hurt others.

I’m asked all the time if I’ve spoken to my victim since my release. I haven’t. Not because I’m not interested, but because I don’t feel I have the right to initiate that conversation. I know that my ignorance and callousness may haunt this man’s nights – and nothing I’ve done since I’ve been released will change that. If his pain is the measure of if I should ever have the chance to be released, I lose every time. I wrote about Rashid because even though our crimes were very different our sentences could have been the same. It’s a humbling thing to have almost ruined your life in 30 minutes. It has made me grateful for second chances.