Love Is Just Complicated

A tangle of feelings involving “A”, “B” and “C”: among the many earnest love poems in The Rose That Grew from Concrete, Love Is Just Complicated is one of the few written with a wink. It appears in the book’s second section, “Nothing Can Come Between Us.”

The title as the only conclusion

The first stanza starts with a request: someone wants the speaker to say what he feels. He searches for words and cannot find any to even begin. His conclusion is the title. Tupac turns it into a visual device as well, writing the sentence one word per line, as if each had to be spoken separately.

In the second stanza things turn into a small comedy. The speaker thought he knew what his heart wanted, and he wanted “A”. But “A” was mixed up with “B”, and then “C” confused him even more. In the end “A” has lost interest, things feel better with “B”, and “C” is hurt and alone. All the speaker can do is repeat his conclusion.

Letters instead of names

The poem shows a side that Leila Steinberg explicitly highlights in her introduction: alongside sensitivity and revolutionary thinking, the book was meant to show Tupac’s sense of humor. Using letters instead of names protects the people involved and makes the situation universal at the same time. Everyone knows a triangle, or a square, like this one.

No date is documented; according to Afeni Shakur’s preface, the poems were written between 1989 and 1991, when Tupac was between 17 and 20. A very different triangle appears in U R Ripping Us Apart!!!: there it stands for a family being torn apart by crack.

More on the book in the introduction.