I Shall Create! If Not A Note,

I Who Have Gone The Gamut From An Almost Angry Rejection Of My Dark Skin By Some Of My Brainwashed Brothers And Sisters To A Surprised Queenhood In The New Black Sunam Qualified To Enter At Least The Kindergarten Of New Consciousness Now... I Have Hopes For Myself.

We Real Cool. We Left School. We Lurk Late. We Strike Straight. We Sing Sin. We Thin Gin. We Jazz June. We Die Soon.

I Am A Writer Perhaps Because I Am Not A Talker. It Has Always Been Hard For Me To Say Exactly What I Mean In Speech But If I Have Written A Clumsiness, I May Erase It.

The Civil Rights Situation Is Like A Pregnancy. It Will Get Worse, I Believe, Before It Gets Better. What The Usual Pregnancy Comes To Is A Decent Baby. That Is What We All Hope Will Be The End Product Of This Stress. It Is Customary, At The End Of A Pregnancy, To Have For Your Pains A Decent Baby.

What I'm Fighting For Now In My Work... For An Expression Relevant To All Manner Of Blacks, Poems I Could Take Into A Tavern, Into The Street, Into The Halls Of A Housing Project.