Tupac's heartfelt teenage poems published for first time

Icon's mentor releases previously unseen poetry

11:42 31st October 2014

Tupac Shakur's handwritten teenage poems have been seen for the first time thanks to his old mentor and manager.

Leila Steinberg, who first met Tupac when he attended her writing workshop in Oakland, gave the poems to magazine Citizens of Humanity. According to Steinberg, the poems were written over a three-year period, starting when Tupac was just 17 years old. In characteristically heartfelt fashion, the iconic artist writes about love, loss and loneliness.

Read an example of the teenage Tupac's writing below.

She told Citizens of Humanity: “My life became consumed with making Pac matter to everybody. I believed he was the one, like Bob Marley and many before him.

"How can you raise a generation who are not wanted? Tupac was obsessed with the pain and imbalance in his community—all of the issues that he was born and cultivated to address.”

Below: The 6 most bizarre stories to emerge about Tupac since his death

His final words were a bit rude: The first officer on the scene of the shooting, Las Vegas police officer Chris Carroll, recently told the world of the rapper's last words - "fuck you", in response to Carroll asking who shot him.
He's the most popular musician amongst the incarcerated: A 2013 report claimed Tupac is the most requested artist on National Prison Radio, which plays in all prisons across the UK.
He wasn't getting along with Dr Dre when he died: It seems things weren't all rosy between Pac and his frequent collaborator Dre when the rapper died in 1996. Speaking about the Tupac Coachella hologram in 2012, Cypress Hill's B-Real said: "I thought it was a little funky, in the sense that at the end of Tupac's life he wasn't getting along with Dre."
The sex tape: In 2011, fuzzy stills of an alleged sex tape featuring Pac, receiving oral sex whilst casually socialising with friends, surfaced. It was the subject of a bidding frenzy, but has since failed to materialise.
Him and Madonna were nearly one big happy family (allegedly): It's common knowledge that the pair had a brief fling shortly before Pac's death in 1996. However, in 2007 an unofficial biography about Madonna claimed the singer was desperate to start a family with the rapper - but got dumped because his acquaintances disapproved of him dating a white woman. Allegedly.
He was nearly a Jedi: In January 2014, Tupac's former collaborator Rick Clifford alleged Pac told him he had been asked by Star Wars creator George Lucas to audition for the role of Jedi Mace Windu, a role that eventually went to Samuel L Jackson.

Photo: WENN.com