Poems are not advertisements braying For the good life They have serious work to do Birthing people burying people Celebrating joy mourning loss

so julian bond was elected president and rap brown chief justice of the supreme court and nixon sold himself on 42nd street for a package of winstons

and as soon as i die i hope everyone who loved me learns the meaning of my death which is a simple lesson don't do what you do very well very well and enjoy it it scares white folkand makes black ones truly mad

and sometimes on rainy nights you see an old white woman who maybe you'd really care about except that you're a young Black woman whose job it is to kill maim or seriously make her question the validity of her existence

I know this it is difficult to grow up it always was it always will be I know this nobody can tell you how to do it You just make the same mistakes and You just thrill to the same excitementI know this Life is a good idea

and neither of them ever said what they meant and i guess nobody ever does

We look, most humans, for a way to be warm and safe; for a haven for our bodies when, once fire was discovered and clothes invented, when once we understood why the squirrels moved seeds around and what to call the plant the jaguar got giggly off of, when once we no longer worried about being eaten by other mammals or each other we looked for meaning with this life we were given.

honey, ain't never been wrong yet you better get back to the city cause you one of them technical niggers and you'll have problems here

Of the many foundations upon which humans rest, words are probably the most solid.