All poems are love poems. Some poems are better off dead.

We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth.

No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.

It is necessary to fall in love, if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

That’s why I like you. You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.

A woman is not written in braille, you don’t have to touch her to know her.

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

So, a popular narrative has become, “These few tokens beat the odds, why can’t all of you?” In fact, no one defeats racism; they just succeed in spite of it.

The fact that you’re struggling doesn’t make you a burden. It doesn’t make you unloveable or undesirable or undeserving of care. It doesn’t make you too much or too sensitive or too needy. It makes you human. Everyone struggles. Everyone has a difficult time coping, and at times, we all fall apart. During these times, we aren’t always easy to be around — and that’s okay. No one is easy to be around one hundred percent of the time. Yes, you may sometimes be unpleasant or difficult. And yes, you may sometimes do or say things that make the people around you feel helpless or sad. But those things aren’t all of who you are and they certainly don’t discount your worth as a human being. The truth is that you can be struggling and still be loved. You can be difficult and still be cared for. You can be less than perfect, and still be deserving of compassion and kindness.

[Richard Pryor] single-handedly taught White America what Black America is about, and taught Black America what White America is about. Listening to Richard Pryor’s compilation of albums, you can understand, visually, what it was like to shoot craps in the back of the Liquor store. White people could safely take a journey through the hood listening to Richard Pryor’s album. We could safely take a journey through Redneckville listening to Richard Pryor’s album.

You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.

There’s something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It’s a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.

My favorite story to tell the younger people. Long ago, I befriended a patron named J. I used to hate him because he’d come in right as I was closing. He knew this. Eventually, he wised up and began coming in earlier and tipping graciously. I would buy him rounds, chat with his coworkers, and make him look like the coolest mother to ever grace a New York bank when he brought clients in for drinks or dinner. J loved me. So when three little snobby intern brats who made it clear they worked with him decided to tip me three dollars on a $310 check, then call me a bitch as they walked out because, hey, they work at a bank, and they are just too cool to be nice to lowly bartenders, they had no idea that I would go to my dear friend J. And here’s the thing: J is in his late 40’s. He’s with it. He likes having the in at my bar. Want to know what J doesn’t like? People associating him with 21-year-old twits who tip badly and call me a bitch on his company’s reputation. J later called the three little interns and told them to come back. He told each to tip me $30. As they left, I told them the most important lesson they might ever learn. I am more important to J than they are. They are one in a million on Monster.com. There are a million other Georgetown, Duke, Brown, Yale, Cornell and UNC kids who could replace them in a second. Their daily routine of getting yelled at and going to pick up lunch for their boss can be performed by any idiot willing to sell his soul for a bullet point on his resume. Me? It took J a year for me to warm up to him. To get the buybacks, to get the reserved tables, to get the “J’s the greatest” in front of the big buyers. I am the reason J comes to this bar. You? You’re about to get fired. Might want to work on that “better than thou” attitude before you graduate.