PoemPart "The Rose That Grew from Concrete"

Life Through My Eyes

Poverty, murder, and rare moments like gold: how young Tupac in Marin City viewed his world-and why he wanted to escape it.

Book: The Rose That Grew from Concrete (1999)
Part: The Rose That Grew from Concrete
Original text: not reproduced (copyright); see the book

Life seen through his bloodshot eyes would scare a square to death: Life Through My Eyes opens with this provocation. The text belongs to the first part of the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete and is one of its shortest social portraits. There is no dedication.

Fun Like Gold, Then Back to Poverty

The provocation is followed by a terse list: poverty, murder, violence, and never a moment of rest. Fun and games are rare, but precious like gold, precisely because the speaker knows he must return to his place in poverty afterward.

In the final stanza, the poem shifts into a defiant tone. People may laugh at him, but his heart will not live on unless his destiny fulfills itself and puts an end to all of this. Whether that means success or escaping the neighborhood, the text leaves open.

Written in Marin City Between 1989 and 1991

According to the preface by Afeni Shakur, the poems were written between 1989 and 1991. An exact date is not documented. Tupac was living in Marin City at the time, an impoverished community in the San Francisco Bay Area where the family had moved from Baltimore in 1988. Leila Steinberg writes in her introduction that he was the only one in her writing circle who had truly experienced poverty.

From here, a direct line leads to Tupac’s early songs: the mix of indictment and desire to escape characterizes, for example, Trapped on 2Pacalypse Now (1991). In the book, the poem stands alongside related texts such as the untitled poem about the “prisoner of poverty” (Untitled) and Or My Soul.