The sun might be God. God might not watch us at night.

I sometimes sit on my roof. Not to be closer to god. To be further from y'all.

There's an inexplicable joy that exists on a brown child's face and in the way they navigate their world long before they discover they're hated.

What you don't think about when you're planning for children is when you're going to teach them how not to be killed

An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary in 2016 is irrelevant.An African American Studies class that is not inherently revolutionary in 2016 is irrelevant.

Undeniable chemistry and horrific timing. They love each other.

Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the strength to knockthem down.

In her attempt to make me a good man, I made her a bad woman.

The relationship was perfect, but I hated everything about the person I became.

Because you thought love was just gonna be there. You weren't taught that it had to be made, it had to be mixed, kneaded, recycled. Over and over, you have to keep creating it. Over and over with everyone you love. Over and over.

I don't know any homophobic people. That suggests fear.The people I know who hate gay folks are:illiterate, nescient, uneducated, uninstructed, unlearned, unschooled, untaught, backward, benighted, primitive, unenlightened, blockheaded, dense, doltish, hebetudinous, obtuse, stupid, thickheaded, thick-wittedBut not homophobic.

I'm silent when there is a war inside me. There's a need to keep the people outside intact.

Some days I feel like I will die for them. Some days, with them.

Can't be on the front lines fighting a war with the weapons given to you by the enemy.

In her head is warAll the time just warI put her to bedI bring peace to the world

I have no clue if it's true and I don't much want to look, but I bet a war happens inside the cocoon.

Your dreams are so far outside of your comfort zone, you've convinced yourself you don't dream at all.

Didn't know where I was going. Didn't care where I ended up. I knew I'd be okay though.

Sanity and sense becomes a prison.

When you don't make it too far from the plantation, you might as well befriend your captors.

They ran to the museums for paintings. I ran to the roof for sunsets

You can't fight and claim you want to be free from the oppressor while still holding tight to things the oppressor gave you.

The scary part of being an artist is knowing that what makes you a better artist can also kill you.

I don't trust people without books or questions.

Intelligence is a burden not many are willing or able to carry.

When you look back at that relationship you didn't think you could live without and realize had you stayed in it, you'd be some comfortable loser, sitting on the couch with another comfortable loser, instead of being the dope motherfucker you are today.

On that search for happiness we did nothing with all those other emotions that made us human.

If you're calling for peace, I am not home.

The heart will stretch a short love into long memories.

The power structure understands that Black folks have been hungry for so long, fixing us a plate now that's the same size as theirs would do nothing for our hunger. After all, they're pretty full and fat.They know we now require a much bigger plate than theirs to quiet the stomach rumblings.They see us and know what it looks like to be less powerful. They are fighting to never FEEL it.

Communities that can't read and translate what the powers are putting out will always be tricked.

I need my eulogy to look better than my resume. I'm living for that.

None of my life is based on how others think I should have lived it.

I don't believe in sin. My relationships that failed have failed because I somehow attract devout christians. I don't believe in virtue either. I think people just do shit and it's life.

One day you will be the only one in the room not living.

I'm homeless. I've taken to the belief that home is not where we lay our heads comfortably some nights, or where we entertain visiting friends. It's not where love is unconditional. When I look up and realize I haven't run away in a long time, I'll know I'm home.

If you weren't built for this life, you'd be dead by now. i think the problem is people don't share enough of their pain with the world, so they never know who else is in pain, too, and what others are going through. we're never really alone in anything.

Seemingly suicidal, it's not. I never wanted to live. I wanted to be happy. Living was always accidental.

as an artist, one of the toughest things to do is getting someone to understand why you think the way you think. And as much as i don't wanna care what they think about my thinking, it comes down to making them understand or watching them leave.

I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft.

i've never believed in anything or anybody that needed constant praise.

Words have never belonged to those who wrote them. Always to those who needed then.

Artists, especially writers, great writers, are the most honest people I know. There are deep confessions in their words. And if we're strong enough to expose the spaces between them, we find truths there also.

I wish I didn’t need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.

adulthood is depressing. for me at least. i cried at the death of every illusion harder than i cried at the death of friends.

The light is supposed to enter through your breaks, wounds, and cracks.

Some men will take you to the movies. Some will take you to the mountaintop.

You asked me to be an open book. As I've already told you, I am. Anything you need to know about me can be found. Don't confuse me, a paperback, with a book on tape.

There’s a small window of opportunity to apologize sometimes after you’ve terribly wronged someone. It closes. Sometimes forever, but it never opens wide enough again for a good breeze.

She left, never to return. I planted a tree and a seed each time I thought of her. I grew a small forest and a large garden and had no one to give the orchids to.

The world is full of 'friends' of suicide victims thinking 'if I had only made that drive over there, I could have done something.

It's crazy. My life has been full of fun and adventure. but i love meeting people who make me feel like I've done nothing.

The right people make you realize fame and fortune is cool, but small moments of pure freedom is better.

With tact, exit from the world I’ve created, and we never have to speak of those good times again.

What their scorned, over-fucked mothers never teach them is this: men can be hurt, too.

If you had the option to pray for me or fight with me, you better choose the fight.

Non Violence and Religion: Both designed to keep the oppressed from murdering their oppressors.

Summer is leaving silently. Much like a traveler approaching the end of an amazing journey.

After every shirt she looks at me and smiles, letting go of air she no longer needs. She laughs after the sweater, knowing I’m gonna tell her it’s too hot for it, knowing she’ll say it’s for the plane and ask “what if the room gets cold?

Too bad children don't know how profound their thoughts are.

Once a year I need to hear you tell me how proud you are of me for growing a little more.

The hate people hold on to for so long is what keeps them from feeling the pain they're most afraid of. deal with it. grow.

Who told these people with dreams, goals and ambitions they could take time off?

Always be you! Just never think you can always be you without consequence.

The walls around the hood keep the people on the inside from the changes on the outside.

i didn't call myself a writer until everyone else did. i knew it was real then.

Some writers may never create a work. Their purpose is to help others create their first word.

Falling in love with a writer is a dangerous thing, isn't it? The only thing you get out of it sometimes is immortality.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.

Hater" and "hate" are used when no critical thought can be formed. We can definitely do better.

I've always looked at America like a foster mother doing it only for the check. At any minute, I just knew she'd be ready to give up on me.

She said she wanted to see beautiful things. I took her to where i planted my seeds.

Beautiful breezes in ugly parts of town give hope to those who want to be free.

Politicians and figureheads bank on the amnesia of the ignorant.

It's okay to not know who you are and what you want. Those with the answers are usually very happy in their own stuck-ness

They tell you the story of Job so often to remind you when you lose it all, stay calm. I've always refused it. I hated the story. It made no sense, and then I developed the belief that religion’s only purpose is to keep the poor from murdering the rich. And then I found the most dangerous folks are those who have nothing to lose, and I put it all together.

I will help build your museumWhen you run out of space to hang your workYou can hang your work in mine

1. Feed off you. 2. Replenish you. 3. Repeat.

I couldn’t love you for who you are because you showed me who you truly wanted to be, and I loved her more.

I’m not sure what it was or where she sprayed it, but her scent will be the end of the life I loved. And I will find comfort in the simpleness of sitting with her on a Saturday afternoon with nothing else to do.

Everyone gets broken. Everyone. Some grow stronger in those breaks. Others never recover.

We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes].

Home is where you were conditioned.

the price you pay for opening your eyes is the easy life you can no longer have. but it becomes worth it.

I have to believe in reincarnation. believing that I'll be in one place forever is a hell in itself.

Because when the night gets here, I’ll be the youngest I’ll ever be again, so I will laugh and celebrate relative youth.

America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.

They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American.

Just like "All American" means "White," "All Lives" means "White.

The meetings and marches and vigils are cool, but if the enemy isn't present, you're just talking slick to a can of oil.

Racism in impenetrable. Staying in America means always fighting. For our own sanity and safety, we must go.

America. Where property damage is a greater offense than genocide.

I wonder if she’s infatuated enough to let me lock her in a box with me on a cool fall day and make love like America depends on us.

You don't get to turn someone's sanctuary into an unsafe space.

A Black church that isn't inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

I have yet to go through a struggle I didn't smile at later.

But you have to sacrifice yourself for YOURSELF, too.

It was once necessary to go from somebody to nothing to become everything.

If they knew how much you kept inside to keep from hurting them, but hurting yourself instead, maybe they’d love you more.

I didn’t mean to snore in your ear, but I wanted to inhale all of what was wrapped up in the comforter with me.

My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep.

African-Amendment.

I am a descendent of a whole bunch of Black folk who couldn't be broken.

Black bodies have become ornamental, haven't they?

It is in racists' best interest to maintain white supremacy at all costs. They will defend it with their lives, but ONLY after they've defended it with ours.

Black people are either threats or entertainment.

What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway."Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don't sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they'll need the energy and strength to build our homes."Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.

Dear Police:You can't protect me and be scared of me.

When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.

You can't forgive your captor and simultaneously be upset at your place in society.

White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.

My heart isn't big enough to care for the oppressors.

They've been practicing racism so long, it's perfect.

Even the Us's are Them's.

We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.

The saddest thing about death, whether it's our own or someone we care for, is when the world doesn't stop when we do.

The saddest thing about death, whether it's our own or someone we care for, is when the world doesn't stop we do.

And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.

Sorrow is what I feel for people who aren’t doing what they love. I keep my distance from them as though they’re contagious. They are, I believe.

Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.

My ideas fuck like rabbits.

An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

You ball up your fist each time you hear about an unfound injustice in the world. That makes me your brother.

They sit there shouting "Don't do it." Someone told them revolution looked like the Cosby Show. A slight tug with a good lesson. Revolution is a tough struggle between what was and what needs to be.

Tell me what you’re looking for and i will become that for you. I can sacrifice my inner freedoms for you without looking twice at my old journals and solid promises I made to myself about such things. But you must be prepared to kill me when the smiles are no longer frequent. Do it while I sleep. While I hold your hand. Do it fast, baby. Do it fast.

Sometimes, some of you speak about god, and I mistake him for an abusive lover you're trying to escape.

Anyone and anything can survive the daylight. It's night that's the hardest to live.

The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company's mission

Gonna pretend to be a deaf mute who knows no sign one day, meet a woman, and we'll write for the rest of our lives.

Not everything set on fire will rise.

Death pulls people from our spaces so often and we accept it as our final payment for having been here and having lived, however big or small. We don’t always have time to notice how things have changed in the absence of some of them. But then death pulls away someone we love, and we find that time. In here, we notice everything; growing grass and fingernails, and songs that end in a minor key. We are too sad to do anything else but watch a clock, applying seconds, minutes, and hours to the trauma and the lacerations. Time, the forever healer, they say. We find the time to wonder how everyone else is moving on, around our paralyzed selves. Ourselves unsure of roads and trees and birds and things. It all blurs and words aren’t words anymore. We find the time to attempt to figure a way to rethink everything we thought about this world and why we came to it.

Waking up in a room with no natural light does something to a man. no windows. I’m almost afraid to die. I fear my soul won’t make it out.

I speak and help some folks only because I believe they may be god in flesh, testing me for politeness.

The oppressor is never as free as they think they are

The thing about oppression is this: when you hold someone down, you, too, have to be there to make sure they don't move.

none of my art is based on how others think i should have done it.

Drugs are the gateway drug

i never begin my writings with talent. i begin them with strong emotions and liquor. they finish with talent.

We have enough proof that, at least my generation does, that patriarchy and matriarchy are gender-less roles.

sex separation in the classroom leads to a bullshit socio-economic situation perpetuated by people with good intentions.

there are institutions filled with people who talk to god. we've labeled and drugged them.

If you’re not seeing God at the climax, it’s not worth doing. Sex is the bridge that connects heaven and earth.

And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.

I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.

Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.

Try evolving as much as you cry.

I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music.

No where in 'humpty dumpty' did it say he was an egg. Maybe your inability to think outside of what others have taught you is what's keeping you from putting him together again.

Fall in love for as long as you can with the one who sees you when you are invisible.

We should fall in love. Love each other enough to shit at the same time on the same toilet.

One day we fall in love with the one who makes us live intensely and laugh hard and heavy. And as hard as we love them, their friend loves us back equally and we just can’t be.

Children teach us how to chase without overrunning.

Watching the summer close is like watching a good kid die for no apparent reason.

I love you because Five floor walk up1 to the 2 to the EThree avenues

Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we’d fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a wall beside a random pipe beside the stove where we left palm and dick prints. We fucked like this. Three condoms in an hour and a half and where are you now? Holding the hand of some local dude you wish was a little more international, wishing you had known I was enough and asked me to stay. You are standing in the kitchen waiting for popcorn to pop while he washes dishes, not knowing I’m wishing back for you.

We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren’t sure if we were in love anymore.

there are no houses to wife. only window seats to occupy when the weather needs changing & waters to flow past our ankles on Sundays as we fish.

The thing about dignity: it can be destroyed, but not taken unless it's given away. It can always be beautified.

the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.

Autumn. The grace in letting dead things fall.

You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets.