“I grew up learning history about communities that would support their people (the idea that it takes a village), but all I see are so many people left on their own.”

Let go of the honey-sweet lies for the bittersweet truths.

When you and the world are out of breath, take the steps to ensure your own needs are met. By the moment you know someone can’t on their own, you’ll hopefully be ready to help.

I carry on knowing that when I deteriorate, my body will be a museum of all I can do and all that hindered me.

It’s really hard to grow up wanting to provide people with resources and support and realizing that while I can and will do that – I also need more than I thought I would.

The thought of you having to try hurts because it feels like you should have known to let me go before you grabbed ahold.

Tell me I’m sun-kissed, but you burn my skin. And you already told me, I was paper thin.

They hit like waves, the memories of those old summer days. Memories you’d have thought to erase, but they crash ashore without haste.

I write poems of the past; they reveal the reasons we didn’t last.

My body is a field site of muscle memory and weathered bones.

I can’t take it all in or else I’ll grow cold when the heat already escapes my fingers and toes.

I wish you could feel it when it’s dark at night, and I think of you when I pass the streetlights. But I know you feel the care without me being there.

Healing means looking within when you want to move on. Healing means letting go when your grip is too tight.

When you write me into your story, don’t set my end in stone. Feel free to let me go. I’d like to join your story, but remember I have my own.

I want to tell them how tired I am because I don’t think it shows. But maybe it’s the same for them – all strangers to the weight each of us carries. So alone, we carry these loads.

Reading has always been my sweetest escape, but I write to convey that which I want to escape or what scares me to say, even if it’s something positive.

We’re so distant, words can’t save us.

Seven out of 10 black faces you see on television are athletes. The black athlete carries the image of the black community. He carries the cross, in a way, until blacks make inroads in other dimensions.

When the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering, and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick.

In all communities you find groups that behave badly. But you must understand them too.

How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.

We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community – and this nation.

I’m at that point where I was able to make a decision on if it was time to follow my goals that are bigger than music, which is service to the community.

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

You grow up in a small community, there’s no outlet like New York or L.A.