What Can I Offer Her?

Long lines, hardly any rhymes, a small story told in a few sentences: What Can I Offer Her? is among the few poems in The Rose That Grew from Concrete that are written almost like prose. It appears in the second section of the book, “Nothing Can Come Between Us”. The text depicts the moment a lifelong romantic dream shatters against dismissive coldness.

Dreamed of All His Life, Yet She Remains Unimpressed

The speaker recounts having dreamed all his life of meeting an exceptionally beautiful woman, charming her, and winning her over forever. Now he has found her, and she is everything he ever wished for, yet she is neither charmed nor curious. At that moment, he asks himself the question that gives the poem its title: What can I offer her?

No answer comes. Tears well up in his eyes, yet he clings to his “bravado” and returns her indifference with the very same look. The poem ends with the title question repeated, now without a question mark, more a statement than a question.

Tears Inside, Indifference Outside

Remarkable is the self-observation: Tupac shows how insecurity disappears behind a pose, tears on the inside, indifference to the outside. Anyone familiar with his later public persona, the demonstrative hardness and self-assurance, will find here an early description of what can lie behind such a facade. That is an interpretation in hindsight, not a statement by Tupac about himself.

He reveals himself as similarly vulnerable in The Fear in the Heart of a Man, where he admits to being more afraid of a broken heart than of any attacker. The Mutual Heartache? strikes this tone as well.

When the poem was written and who is meant is not documented. According to the preface by Afeni Shakur, the poems date from the years 1989 to 1991.

More on the book and all poems in the introduction.